MEAM Seminar: “Mobile Wireless Infrastructure on Demand in Robot Teams”

The promise of multi-robot systems is that they can complete tasks quicker and more efficiently than a single robot. However, such performance gains are only realized if robots can communicate with each other and coordinate their actions. As on-board autonomy advances, robots are increasingly being deployed in environments without existing wireless infrastructure and must rely instead on peer-to-peer or ad-hoc networks in order to exchange information. In these scenarios, control actions taken to complete the task objective often move robots out of direct communication range of one another, introducing a tension between task fulfillment and communication network maintenance. In this seminar, I will present my work towards eliminating this tension and enabling multi-robot teams to operate in challenging environments by using robots as mobile wireless infrastructure.