Keeping in touch: maintaining biconnected structure by homogeneous robots

For many distributed autonomous robotic systems, it is important to maintain communication connectivity among the robots. That is, each robot must be able to communicate with each other robot, perhaps through a series of other robots. Ideally, this property should be robust to the removal of any single robot from the system. In (Ahmadi & Stone 2006a) we define a property of a team's communication graph that ensures this property, called biconnectivity. In that paper, a distributed algorithm to check if a team of robots is biconnected and its correctness proof are also presented. In this paper we provide distributed algorithms to add and remove robots to/from a multi-robot team while maintaining the biconnected property. These two algorithms are implemented and tested in the Player/Stage simulator.