Multirobot online construction of communication maps

Abstract

The importance of communication in many multirobot information-gathering tasks requires the availability of reliable communication maps. These provide estimates of the radio signal strength and can be used to predict the presence of communication links between different locations of the environment. In the problem we consider, a team of mobile robots has to build such maps autonomously in a robot-to-robot communication setting. The solution we propose models the signal's distribution with a Gaussian Process and exploits different online sensing strategies to coordinate and guide the robots during their data acquisition. Our methods show interesting operative insights both in simulations and on real TurtleBot 2 platforms.