D-Lite: Navigation-Oriented Compression of 3D Scene Graphs under Communication Constraints

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 and bit-rate, 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 geometric and semantic aspects of the environment. Then, we leverage graph-theoretic tools, namely graph spanners, to design heuristic strategies that efficiently compress 3D Scene Graphs to enable communication under bandwidth constraints. Our compression strategies are navigation-oriented in that they are designed to approximately preserve shortest paths between locations of interest, while meeting a user-specified communication budget constraint. Effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated via extensive numerical analysis and on synthetic robot navigation experiments in a realistic simulator. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/nKYXU5VC6A8.