When Robotics Meets Wireless Communications: An Introductory Tutorial

The importance of ground mobile robots (MRs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) within the research community, industry, and society is growing fast. Nowadays, many of these agents are equipped with communication systems that are, in some cases, essential to successfully achieve certain tasks. In this context, we have begun to witness the development of a new interdisciplinary research field at the intersection of robotics and communications. This research field has been boosted by the intention of integrating UAVs within the 5G and 6G communication networks and will undoubtedly lead to many important applications in the near future. Nevertheless, one of the main obstacles to the development of this research area is that most researchers address these problems by oversimplifying either the robotics or the communications aspects. Doing so impedes the ability to reach the full potential of this new interdisciplinary research area. In this tutorial, we present some of the modeling tools necessary to address problems involving both robotics and communication from an interdisciplinary perspective. As an illustrative example of such problems, we focus on the issue of communication-aware trajectory planning in this tutorial.