Bringing Network Coding into Multi-Robot Systems: Interplay Study for Autonomous Systems over Wireless Communications

Communication is a core enabler for multi-robot systems (MRS), providing the mechanism through which robots exchange state information, coordinate actions, and satisfy safety constraints. While many MRS autonomy algorithms assume reliable and timely message delivery, realistic wireless channels introduce delay, erasures, and ordering stalls that can degrade performance and compromise safety-critical decisions of the robot task. In this paper, we investigate how transport-layer reliability mechanisms that mitigate communication losses and delays shape the autonomy-communication loop. We show that conventional non-coded retransmission-based protocols introduce long delays that are misaligned with the timeliness requirements of MRS applications, and may render the received data irrelevant. As an alternative, we advocate for adaptive and causal network coding, which proactively injects coded redundancy to achieve the desired delay and throughput that enable relevant data delivery to the robotic task. Specifically, this method adapts to channel conditions between robots and causally tunes the communication rates via efficient algorithms. We present two case studies: cooperative localization under delayed and lossy inter-robot communication, and a safety-critical overtaking maneuver where timely vehicle-to-vehicle message availability determines whether an ego vehicle can abort to avoid a crash. Our results demonstrate that coding-based communication significantly reduces in-order delivery stalls, preserves estimation consistency under delay, and improves deadline reliability relative to retransmission-based transport. Overall, the study highlights the need to jointly design autonomy algorithms and communication mechanisms, and positions network coding as a principled tool for dependable multi-robot operation over wireless networks.