Opportunistic Communication in Robot Teams

In this paper we present a new approach to Mobile Infrastructure on Demand (MID) where a dedicated team of robots creates and sustains a wireless network that satisfies the communication requirements of a different team of task-oriented robots seeking to coordinate their actions in the absence of existing communication infrastructure. Different from previous works, our approach forgoes heuristics for network performance such as algebraic-connectivity or network flow optimizations and instead positions communication support robots to directly maximize the probability of packet delivery by the underlying opportunistic routing protocol. Our system is task agnostic and practical to implement and operate on robots equipped with off-the-shelf WiFi radios. We demonstrate this through a set of experiments showing our MID system maintaining the delivery of critical mission data in a situational awareness setting and enabling foraging robots to effectively coordinate their actions during multi-robot exploration.