A Unified Controller for the Connectivity Maintenance of a Robotic Router Networks

The robots equipped with wireless networking modules can act as mobile routers to bridge the communications of a network. How to adjust the robot network topology and the motion of mobile routers adaptively to support the communication connectivity to mobile users in group task execution is still remained challenging. In this paper, we addressed this challenging by developing a unified motion controller to drive the robots to approach their individual task region while maintaining the desired network topology and keeping collision-free with obstacles in environment. To achieve this, a new concept termed rubber communication model is first proposed to evaluate the real communication signal, which enables adding and removing communication links amongst robots. Then, a continuous model for collision avoidance is utilized for avoiding obstacles. Together with the rubber communication model and continuous model for collision avoidance, the tasks assigned to the robots are modeled as series of geometrical task regions which is formulated with the regional reaching constraint function. The three models are utilized in building the potential field function, based on which a bounded control input is generated for multirobot control. Simulations are finally performed on a group of mobile robots to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.