Dynamic, Decentralized Spatial Code Reuse for OCDMA LiDAR in Robot Swarms

Abstract:Robots in a LiDAR-equipped swarm mutually interfere when their optical ranging codes collide. Existing mitigations either assign codes statically -- requiring $L=N$ distinguishable codes for $N$ robots -- or react to detected interference without a scalable, coordinated assignment rule beneath them; prior work explicitly identifies the code-assignment scaling problem as unsolved. We propose a decentralized protocol in which robots dynamically reassign spatial reuse codes based on a live, beacon-maintained interference-neighborhood graph, and prove that the number of codes required grows as $O(\log N/\log\log N)$ under constant robot density -- an unbounded improvement over the $\Theta(N)$ growth of static assignment. We validate this result under conditions substantially beyond the idealized proof -- robot mobility, imperfect beacon-based detection, and reactive reassignment -- via Monte Carlo simulation (30 seeds per condition, 95% confidence intervals): the advantage over static assignment widens from roughly $2\times$ at 15 robots to $12\times$ at 120. Against a structurally faithful, fairly constructed model of an existing coordination-free approach, our protocol achieves both substantially greater code-reuse efficiency and 30--40% lower collision risk under an identical, constrained code budget, demonstrating that coordination -- not merely reactivity -- is what closes the scaling gap.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.28172 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.28172v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.28172 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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