Use of a Robot Platoon to Implement Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork in Rescue Scenario - Preliminary Experimental Results

This paper proposes the use of a platoon of mobile robots to carry a number of repeater antennas in order to guarantee a constant communication between a rescue operator (human or robot) and a fixed base station. These mobile antennas suitably move to dynamically ensure a multi-hop communication link, handling the occurrence of obstacles, signal fading area and failures such as, e.g., the fault of one or more mobile robots. The control objective is achieved in the framework of a kind of behavioral control, namely the null-space-based behavioral control (NSB). The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is verified in preliminary experiments obtained using a platoon of Khepera II mobile robots.