Towards autonomous wireless backbone deployment in highly-obstructed environments

In a setting that lacks infrastructure e.g., urban search and rescue, a team of networked mobile robots can provide a communication substrate by acting as routers in a wireless mesh network. We study the problem of determining the minimum number of robots, and how to position them, so that all clients using the resulting robotic network are connected and all network links satisfy minimum rate requirements. The key challenge we address is that in an environment with obstacles the strength of a wireless link is a non-monotonic function of the distance between the link end-points. Our approach to the problem is based on virtual potential fields. Clients and environmental obstacles are modeled as virtual charged particles exerting virtual forces on the robots. We validate our algorithm with physical robots in an indoor environment and demonstrate that we are able to get feasible solutions.