Communication-Motion Planning for Wireless Relay-Assisted Multi-Robot System

Abstract

This letter focuses on a scenario in which a team of sensing robots survey an area with predefined routes, and transmit the monitored information to a remote base station through a mobile relay. In this scenario, automatically adjusting the position of the mobile relay for maintaining wireless link quality while the sensing robots are moving is a challenging problem. In this letter, we consider the problem of minimizing the total energy consumption. We propose using dynamic programming (DP) and single-step optimization. By comparing the pros and cons of both methods, we propose a novel approximate optimal communication-motion planning (AOCMP) method based on approximate dynamic programming (ADP). Simulation results demonstrate that AOCMP may sharply decrease the computation time compared with DP, while performs better than single-step optimization which proves that AOCMP achieves a beneficial energy-complexity tradeoff for solving high-dimension problems.