Maintaining Communication Links Using a Team of Mobile Robots

This paper presents a comprehensive metric to evaluate the link quality and the corresponding control schemes for the distributed control of a team of robots to maintain the communication links. The mobile robots dynamically reconfigure themselves to maintain reliable end-to-end communication links. Such applications require online measurements of communication quality in real time and require a mapping between link quality and robot positions. In this paper, we present the empirical results and analysis of a link variability study for an indoor and outdoor environments including received signal strength indicator (RSSI), throughput and packet loss rate. The distributed control algorithms consider the environmental constrains and obstacles. Moreover, the self-deployment algorithms allow a team of robots to recognize the coverage gap by monitoring link qualities, and deploy the mobile robots for a variety of applications including self-healing, tethering, intelligent relaying. The assessment of link quality acts as the feedback for cooperative control of mobile robots. The experimental results have shown the effectiveness of evaluation for communication links and the related control schemes.