MODEN: Obstacle-driven Elastic Network for Line-of-Sight Communication

In this paper, we address the problem of connecting two distant communication nodes by deploying a number of mobile robots that act as gateways between the towers. To address this problem, we propose ODEN, a path-planning algorithm that relies on an elastic network to produce an obstacle-free path between the two towers. This algorithm builds over a previous elastic-network-based path-planning algorithm and overcomes some of the major limitations of this algorithm. We also propose an extension of ODEN to address the more complex situation in which multiple pairs of towers must be connected in a common environment. We illustrate the results obtained with both ODEN and its multi-path counterpart, MODEN, in several test-scenarios.