Communication-Aware Motion Planning for Mobile Robots

Abstract

Mobile robots have found numerous applications in recent years, in ar-eas such as consumer robotics, environmental monitoring, security and trans-portation. For information dissemination, multi-robot cooperation or opera-tor intervention, reliable communications are important. The combination of communication constraints with other requirements in robotics, such as navi-gation and obstacle avoidance is called communication-aware motion planning. To facilitate integration, communication-aware methods should fit into tradi-tional layered architectures of motion planning. This thesis contains two main contributions, applicable to such an architecture. The first contribution is to develop strategies for exploiting multipath fad-ing while following a reference trajectory. By deviating from the reference, a robot can stop and communicate at positions with high signal strength, trad-ing tracking performance for link quality. We formulate this problem in three different ways: First we maximize the link quality, subject to deterministic