Architecture and protocol design for a pervasive robot swarm communication networks

There has been increasing interest in deploying a team of robots, or robot swarms, to fulfill certain complicate tasks such as surveillance. Since robot swarms may move to areas of far distance, it is important to have a pervasive networking environment for communications among robots, administrators, and mobile users. In this paper, we first propose a pervasive architecture to integrate wireless mesh networks and robot swarm networks to build a robot swarm communication network within the areas of special interest. Under the proposed architecture, one or more robots can get connected with a nearby mesh router and access the remote server, while a self-organizing mobile ad hoc network is formed within each swarm for communications among the robots. We then address and analyze many important issues and challenges. Finally, we describe our work to enable this architecture through a scalable algorithm for autonomous swarm deployment and ROBOTRAK, a socket-based-swarm monitoring and control toolkit. Extensive simulation results and demonstrations are presented to show the desirable features of the proposed algorithm and toolkit. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.