Communication Strategies for Social Multi-Robot Systems Using ROS

Abstract

In multi-robot systems, communication is the foundation for a successful interaction. Coordinating multiple social robots in a shared environment requires effective interaction. However, multi-robot architectures often face issues with synchronization, scalability, and identifying the source of each message. This paper analyzes four multi-robot communication strategies based on ROS and implemented on the social robot Mini. Our contribution explores the following options: (i) a shared namespace that ensures synchronization but limits individual autonomy; (ii) isolated namespaces with point-to-point messaging—simple to implement but poorly scalable; (iii) a global namespace where topics are tagged by sender, enabling dynamic adaptation and sender identification at the cost of increased receiver complexity; and (iv) a simplified variant using a single global topic plus an auxiliary channel for sender ID, which reduces complexity but requires coherence mechanisms. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluation, we find that strategy (iii), thanks to its flexibility and automatic adaptation to changing groups, is particularly well suited to dynamic social-robotics environments.