  An efficient communication mechanism forms the backbone for any multi-robot
system to achieve fruitful collaboration and coordination. Limitation in the
existing asynchronous transmission based strategies in fast dissemination and
aggregation compels the designers to prune down such requirements as much as
possible. This also restricts the possible application areas of mobile
multi-robot systems. In this work, we introduce concurrent transmission based
strategy as an alternative. Despite the commonly found difficulties in
concurrent transmission such as microsecond level time synchronization,
hardware heterogeneity, etc., we demonstrate how it can be exploited for
multi-robot systems. We propose a split architecture where the two major
activities - communication and computation are carried out independently and
coordinate through periodic interactions. The proposed split architecture is
applied on a custom build full networked control system consisting of five
two-wheel differential drive mobile robots having heterogeneous architecture.
We use the proposed design in a leader-follower setting for coordinated dynamic
speed variation as well as the independent formation of various shapes.
Experiments show a centimeter-level spatial and millisecond-level temporal
accuracy while spending very low radio duty-cycling over multi-hop
communication under a wide testing area.
