Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Age of Information (AoI)
multi-robot sensing
connected graphs
stochastic sensing delays
data transport
AoI-Aware Multi-Robot Sensing and Transport on Connected Graphs
🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses cooperative sensing and data dissemination in multi-robot systems operating over connected graphs, aiming to minimize the Age of Information (AoI) while accounting for stochastic sensing delays and hop-based communication delays. By decomposing AoI into sensing and propagation components, the authors separately optimize robot resource allocation and sample transmission paths. The sensing component is formulated as a separable discrete convex resource allocation problem, solved optimally via a greedy water-filling algorithm, while the propagation component leverages shortest-path trees combined with Eulerian tours to construct a full-delivery mechanism. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that this mechanism achieves the derived network-wide lower bound on AoI, and simulations confirm its effectiveness in significantly reducing AoI compared to baseline approaches.
📝 Abstract
A team of mobile robots monitors spatially distributed processes and delivers measurements to a base, where AoI is measured from sensing start, capturing both stochastic parallel sensing delays and hop-based propagation. At each non-base node, multiple robots may collaborate, yielding node-dependent geometric group sensing times, while other robots act as mobile conveyors that transport samples along unit-time edges. The paper first derives a per-node and network-wide AoI lower bound that decomposes into a sensing term, determined by mean group sensing times, and a propagation term, given by shortest-path distances. It then shows that minimizing the sensing component yields a separable discretely convex resource allocation problem, solved optimally by a greedy water-filling algorithm. A shortest-path-tree conveyor architecture with an Euler-walk deployment is constructed and proven to attain the lower bound in a full-conveyor regime. Numerical simulations illustrate the impact of sensing allocation and conveyor deployment on AoI performance.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Age of Information (AoI)
multi-robot collaboration
discrete convex optimization
shortest-path tree
Euler-walk deployment
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