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 this work, we define a property of a team's communication graph that ensures this property, called biconnectivity. We present a distributed algorithm to check if a team of robots is biconnected, prove its correctness, and analyze it theoretically. We also 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.

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In Proceedings of the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 580-85, July 2006.

@InProceedings{AAAI06-mazda, title={Keeping in Touch: Maintaining Biconnected Structure by Homogeneous Robots}, author={Mazda Ahmadi and Peter Stone}, booktitle={Proceedings of the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, month={July}, pages={580-85}, url="http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/?AAAI06-mazda", year={2006} }