Distributed beamforming using mobile robots

We consider the case where a team of unmanned vehicles are tasked with distributed beamforming in order to cooperatively transmit a message to a remote station. We propose a joint motion and communication optimization framework where the robots move in order to find locations that satisfy the given reception quality requirement while minimizing the overall motion energy consumption. For the case where the channel is perfectly known, we show that this problem can be posed as a knapsack problem and show the underlying trends of the optimum solution. We then extend our approach to the case where the channel is not known over the space. We show how the previously proposed channel prediction framework can be integrated with path planning for distributed robotic beamforming under motion energy constraints. Finally, we present extensive simulation results in realistic communication environments.