Computation Sharing in Distributed Robotic Systems: A Case Study on SLAM

Aiming at increasing team efficiency, mobile robots may act as a node of a Robotic Cluster to assist their teammates in computationally demanding tasks. Having this in mind, we propose two distributed architectures for the Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) problem, our main case study. The analysis focuses especially on the efficiency gain that can be obtained. It is shown that the proposed architectures enable us to raise the workload up to values that would not be possible in a single robot solution, thus gaining in localization precision and map accuracy. Furthermore, we assess the impact of network bandwidth. All the results are extracted from frequently used SLAM datasets available in the robotics community and a real world testbed is described to show the potential of using the proposed philosophy.