Hierarchical Auction-based Mechanism for Real-Time Resource Retrieval in Cloud Mobile Robotic System

—In order to share information in the cloud formulti-robot systems, efcient data transmission is essentialfor real-time operations such as coordinated robotic missions.As a limited resource, bandwidth is ubiquitously required byapplications among physical multi-robot systems. In this paper,we proposed a hierarchical auction-based mechanism, namelyLQM (Link Quality Matrix)-auction. It consists of multipleprocedures, such as hierarchical auction, proxy scheduling. Notethat the proposed method is designed for real-time resourceretrieval for physical multi-robot systems, instead of simulatedvirtual agents.We validate the proposed mechanism through real-timeexperiments. The results show that LQM-auction is suitable forscheduling a group of robots, leading to optimized performancefor resource retrieval. I. I NTRODUCTION Nowadays, mobile robotics evolves rapidly along with thesocial development. They provide heterogeneous servicesfor humans. Not surprisingly, robotic services are morecomplicated than ever before. Despite the diversity of roboticservices, it is impossible to develop a universal robot whichis capable of all expected services due to various limitations,such as power consumption, payload, sensory and kinematicconstraints. As for a typical robotic system, a mobile robotequipped with various sensors, is usually expensive andpower consuming. Beneting from the highly developednetwork, all primary information can be stored and retrievedfrom online data centers such as a cloud, by which therequirements on local infrastructures are alleviated.Nevertheless, there are still drawbacks and challenges tobe further addressed. For instance, limited network band-width and communication range in robotic system are theprimary hold-backs, since most of the robotic applicationsneed real-time data transmission, e.g. navigation and lo-calization generally require a large bandwidth to transmitthe raw sensor measurements. Moreover, some applicationsinvolving cooperative control of a robot team have hardreal-time communication requirements. Recently, the real-time wireless multi-hop protocol (RT-WMP) [1] has beenproposed on top of IEEE 802.11, which provides real-timecommunication among multiple robots. RT-WMP is capableof managing the message priority and mobility for bothoutdoor and indoor environments. Adopting this facility, we