Robot swarm communication networks: Architectures, protocols, and applications

There have been increasing interests in deploying a team of robots, or robot swarms, to fulfill certain complicated tasks such as surveillance. Since robot swarms may move to areas of far distance, it is important to have a pervasive networking environment for communications among robots, administrators, and mobile users. For this purpose, we propose to build a wireless mesh network as the wireless backbone within the areas of special interest. One or more robots can get connected with a nearby mesh router and access the remote server. Within each swarm, a self-organizing mobile ad hoc network is formed. With this type of robot swarm communication network, there are many important open issues to be addressed.