Hybrid topology control: a dynamic leader-based distributed edge-addition and deletion mechanism

2026-03-13

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of maintaining real-time connectivity in multi-robot systems under communication delays and unknown dynamic disturbances, where conventional consensus-based topological reconfiguration methods suffer from high decision latency and excessive communication overhead. To overcome these limitations, the authors propose a real-time topology reconfiguration approach based on a dynamic leader mechanism. The central node employs a robust position estimation algorithm to rapidly determine the addition or removal of communication edges within a single communication round, using graph diameter—rather than node count—as the key decision metric, thereby effectively bounding the communication graph diameter. By integrating a leader-follower architecture with a low-overhead edge adjustment strategy, the method significantly reduces decision latency while preserving system connectivity. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed approach efficiently maintains connectivity and enhances overall team performance in environments with disturbances and communication delays.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multi-Robot Systems
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication

Application Category

• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems

Abstract

Coordinated operations of multi-robot systems (MRS) require agents to maintain communication connections to accomplish team objectives. However, maintaining the connections imposes costs in terms of restricted robot mobility, resulting in suboptimal team performance. In this work, we consider a realistic MRS framework in which agents are subject to unknown dynamical disturbances and experience communication delays. Most existing works on connectivity maintenance use consensus-based frameworks for graph reconfiguration, where decision-making time scales with the number of nodes and requires multiple rounds of communication, making them ineffective under communication delays. To address this, we propose a novel leader-based decision-making algorithm that uses a central node for efficient real-time reconfiguration, reducing decision-making time to depend on the graph diameter rather than the number of nodes and requiring only one round of information transfer through the network. We propose a novel method for estimating robot locations within the MRS that actively accounts for unknown disturbances and the communication delays. Using these position estimates, the central node selects a set of edges to delete while allowing the formation of new edges, aiming to keep the diameter of the new graph within a threshold. We provide numerous simulation results to showcase the efficacy of the proposed method.

Problem

• multi-robot systems
• connectivity maintenance
• communication delays
• dynamic disturbances
• topology control

Innovation

• leader-based topology control
• dynamic edge addition/deletion
• communication delay robustness
• graph diameter optimization
• multi-robot connectivity maintenance