Robotic clusters

A robotic cluster is a group of individual robots which are able to share their processing resources among the group in order to quickly solve computationally hard problems.
In most multi-robot systems, an individual robot is not capable of solving computationally hard problems due to lack of high processing power. The concept of robotic clusters empowers these systems in their problem solving.
* The amount of required and available processing resources: The robots which lack processing resources (called requesters) or have extra processing resources (called providers), should join together to establish a cluster and help each other. The role of the robots as being requesters or providers can dynamically change in a robotic cluster.
* The overhead of the clustering and the speed of the network: The robots which request using processing resources of the cluster should measure the overhead of clustering for that special task before sending the request. The overhead of clustering depends on many parameters including the network’s speed, the amount of data that needs to be exchanged between the robots, the speed of slowest node of the cluster and the level of parallelism of the robotic application.
Spatial distribution
In spite of computer clusters, in robotic clusters, nodes are distributed in the space and they are able to interact with the environment by their sensors and actuators. In some robotic applications this point may provide several profits/interests. The robots can sense the environment from different points of view and share their acquired data with each other through the cluster. By running a parallel algorithm in this cluster the robots can cooperatively process the shared data and extract/detect the feature. Therefore, in addition to higher processing capabilities, the spatial distribution of the robotic clusters might be a beneficial point in some applications. modeling
, and dealing with the communication issues (namely latency, overhead and bandwidth) in parallel processing with computer clusters that can be adapted to robotic clusters as well.

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