Robotic Communication Backbone

Robots with network capabilities can cooperate to establish a network backbone, providing a network service interconnecting a set of clients (humans or mobile robots). In this work, we consider the problem of autonomously deploy a team of robots to establish a wireless backbone in complex environments so that a set of clients is fully-connected. Our solution is divided into two phases. First, we calculate the Euclidean Steiner Tree with the client set as terminals. Then, we define a communicating extended finite state machine so robots can establish the backbone autonomously. We validate our algorithm with simulation and with physical robots (iCreate with ROS) in an indoor environment and demonstrate that we are able to get feasible solutions. We evaluated the establish backbone with important network metric (end to end TCP throughput).