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On the Usage of General-Purpose Compression Techniques for the Optimization of Inter-robot Communication

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Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering ((LNEE,volume 370))

Abstract

Managing the bandwidth requirements of a team of robots operating cooperatively is an ubiquitous and commonly overlooked problem, despite being a crucial issue in the successful deployment of robotic teams. As the team’s size grows, its bandwidth requirements can easily rise to unsustainable levels. On the other hand, general-purpose compression techniques are commonly used to transmit data through constrained communication channels, and may offer a solution to this problem. In this paper, we study the possibility of using general-purpose compression techniques to improve the efficiency of inter-robot communication, firstly by comparing the performance of various compression techniques in the context a of multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) scenarios using simplified occupancy grids, and secondly by performing tests with one of the compression techniques on real-world data.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Such as Squeeze Chart (http://www.squeezechart.com/) and Compression Ratings (http://compressionratings.com/).

  2. 2.

    zlib is available at http://www.zlib.net/.

  3. 3.

    The LZMA SDK used is available at http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html.

  4. 4.

    LZ4 is available at http://code.google.com/p/lz4/.

  5. 5.

    QuickLZ is freely available for non-commercial purposes at http://quicklz.com/.

  6. 6.

    Snappy is available at https://code.google.com/p/snappy/.

  7. 7.

    The tool is publicly available under the BSD license at https://github.com/gondsm/mrgs_compression_benchmark.

  8. 8.

    A description of the gmapping package can be found at http://wiki.ros.org/slam_gmapping.

  9. 9.

    The raw log data used to create these maps is available at http://kaspar.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~slamEvaluation/datasets.php.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the CHOPIN research project (PTDC/EEA-CRO/119000/2010) and by the ISR-Institute of Systems and Robotics (project PEst-C/EEI/UI0048/2011), funded by the Portuguese science agency “Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia” (FCT).

The authors would like to acknowledge Eurico Pedrosa, Nuno Lau and Artur Pereira [1] for providing us with a software tool intended to adapt the raw sensor log files into a format readable by ROS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Systems and Robotics, University of Coimbra, 3030-790, Coimbra, Portugal

    Gonçalo S. Martins, David Portugal & Rui P. Rocha

Authors
  1. Gonçalo S. Martins
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  2. David Portugal
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  3. Rui P. Rocha
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gonçalo S. Martins .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal INSTICC, Setúbal, Portugal

    Joaquim Filipe

  2. Ford Research & Adv. Engineering, Dearborn, Michigan, USA

    Oleg Gusikhin

  3. Univ Paris-Est Creteil (UPEC), Créteil, France

    Kurosh Madani

  4. Carleton University, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Jurek Sasiadek

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Martins, G.S., Portugal, D., Rocha, R.P. (2016). On the Usage of General-Purpose Compression Techniques for the Optimization of Inter-robot Communication. In: Filipe, J., Gusikhin, O., Madani, K., Sasiadek, J. (eds) Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 370. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26453-0_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26453-0_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-26451-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-26453-0

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