D-Lite: Navigation-Oriented Compression of 3D Scene Graphs for Multi-Robot Collaboration

Understand

For a multi-robot team that collaboratively explores an unknown environment, it is of vital importance that collected information is efficiently shared among robots in order to support exploration and navigation tasks.

• Practical constraints of wireless channels, such as limited bandwidth, urge robots to carefully select information to be transmitted.
• In this paper, we consider the case where environmental information is modeled using a 3D Scene Graph, a hierarchical map representation that describes both geometric and semantic aspects of the environment.
• Then, we leverage graph-theoretic tools, namely graph spanners, to design greedy algorithms that efficiently compress 3D Scene Graphs with the aim of enabling communication between robots under bandwidth constraints.