Efficient Communication Protocol for Programmable Matter

Lattice-based modular robots are composed of modules arranged on a lattice and forming 3D shapes, if these robots are small enough and many enough, they form a programmable matter. This work proposes a method for optimising data communication times between modules by compressing the data. We have first analysed the communication delay between the end device modules, then a set of recent lossless compression algorithms was tested to select the optimal one to implement with Blinky Block. Based on the results obtained, we propose to add a lossless data compression scheme to reduce the communicated data size and consequently communication delay. We found that the “Brotli” compression algorithm is the most suitable one for modular robot communication as it achieved a good balance between computing and communication overhead. Then, based on the compression ratio and the communication delay interpolation, a significant gain is achieved by reducing the communication delay by a factor of 5.