2020/02/07 by Mox, Daniel, Calvo-Fullana, Miguel, Gerasimenko, Mikhail +3
#FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Robotics (cs.RO) #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2002.03026
In this work, we introduce Mobile Wireless In-frastructure on Demand: a framework for providing wireless connectivity to multi-robot teams via autonomously reconfiguring ad-hoc networks. In many cases, previous multi-agent systems either assumed the availability of existing communication infrastructure or were required to create a network in addition to completing their objective. Instead our system explicitly assumes the responsibility of creating and sustaining a wireless network capable of satisfying end-to-end communication requirements of a team of agents, called the task team, performing an arbitrary objective. To accomplish this goal, we propose a joint optimization framework that alternates between finding optimal network routes to support data flows between the task agents and improving the performance of the network by repositioning a collection of mobile relay nodes referred to as the network team. We demonstrate our approach with simulations and experiments wherein wireless connectivity is provided to patrolling task agents.