  To perform cooperative tasks in a decentralized manner, multi-robot systems
are often required to communicate with each other. Therefore, maintaining the
communication graph connectivity is a fundamental issue when roaming a
territory with obstacles. However, when dealing with real-robot systems,
several sources of data corruption can appear in the agent interaction. In this
paper, the effects of failure and noise in the communication between agents are
analyzed upon a connectivity maintenance control strategy. The results show
that the connectivity strategy is resilient to the negative effects of such
disturbances under realistic settings that consider a bandwidth limit for the
control effort. This opens the perspective of applying the connectivity
maintenance strategy in adaptive schemes that consider, for instance,
autonomous adaptation to constraints other than connectivity itself, e.g.
communication efficiency and energy harvesting.
