Enabling “See-and-Point” Communication Between Robots

This paper proposes a novel address mapping mechanism for multi-robot communication and collaboration systems, named SPing. SPing addresses each robot with a dynamicphysical-world address- an encoding of the robot's physical location - rather than a pre-assigned digital-world ID (e.g., the IP address). This enables a “see-and-point” communication mode for robots: a robot can establish an immediate connection pointing to any other robot it intends to collaborate with in its visual field, without relying on a pre-existing multi-robot network. This on one hand improves the robustness and usefulness of multi-robot systems in uncertain and unstructured environments where network infrastructures are unavailable. On the other hand, it makes the robots' communication behavior tightly coupled with and more supportive of the collaboration tasks in the physical world. We build an end-to-end prototype of SPing and evaluate its performance in both static and mobile scenarios. The results show that SPing can always establish a connection precisely pointing to the target receiver with an average matching rate of 99.58%, and a spatial resolution of 0.3 m$\sim$0.5m.