Autonomous wireless backbone deployment with bounded number of networked robots

Abstract

Networked robots can provide a communication substrate by establishing a wireless network backbone. Here, we investigate the problem of autonomously deploying robots to establish a wireless communication backbone so that a team of clients get connected. First, our approach calculates the Steiner Tree, considering even if the environment has obstacles. Then, we design a communicating extended finite state machine that allows robots to deploy the backbone autonomously. We prove that our approach needs a bounded number of networked robots. We validate our algorithm with simulations and experiments with physical robots in an indoor environment. We also evaluate the established backbone with network metric (end to end TCP throughput).