In this work we present a new approach to Mobile Infrastructure on Demand (MID) where a dedicated team of robots creates and sustains a wireless network that satisfies the communication requirements of a different team of task-oriented robots seeking to coordinate their actions in the absence of existing communication infrastructure. Different from previous works, our approach forgoes heuristics for network performance such as algebraic-connectivity or network flow optimizations and instead positions communication support robots to directly maximize the probability of packet delivery by the underlying opportunistic routing protocol. Our system is task agnostic and practical to implement and operate on robots equipped with off-the-shelf WiFi radios. We demonstrate this through a set of experiments showing our MID system maintaining the delivery of critical mission data in a situational awareness setting and enabling foraging robots to effectively coordinate their actions during multi-robot exploration.
Publications
Daniel Mox, Kashish Garg, Alejandro Ribeiro, Vijay Kumar, "Opportunistic Communication in Robot Teams" International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024. paper, recorded presentation
Code
The code used to complete this work is available on github.
Media
The following video is a recorded presentation of the work, prepared for presentation at ICRA 2022.
