Publication Details

Commbots: Distributed control of mobile communication relays

by Brian P. Gerkey and Roger Mailler and Benoit Morisset

in Proc. of the AAAI Workshop on Auction Mechanisms for Robot Coordination (AuctionBots) pp. 51-57,

Abstract

Digital wireless communication networks are vital in modern life. However, these networks rely on centralized infrastructure that is extremely vulnerable to disaster or attack. We seek to improve the communication environment in post-disaster scenarios by developing groups of mobile communication relay robots, or commbots, that can be deployed to replace damaged infrastructure. The job of a commbot is to position itself so as to maximize overall network performance, which presents a rich and complex distributed learning and control problem. We have implemented three distributed algorithms and have tested them in simulation on a variety of instances of the commbots problem. We present results from these simulations and compare and contrast the different approaches.

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Associated Projects

Self-organizing mobile ad hoc networks We address the problem of controlling large numbers of small mobile robots that form a multi-hop ad hoc communication network. We employ learning, optimization, and distributed coordination techniques to enable the robots to self-organize in order to maximize network performance.

AIC Personnel

	Name	Title	E-mail
	Gerkey, Brian P.	Alumnus
	Mailler, Roger	Alumnus
	Morisset, Benoit	Alumnus