ANCHOR - self-configuring robotic network

Abstract

A challenging task for a robotic radio network is to establish the connectivity among a set of entities (humans or radio nodes) in an unknown environment with minimum number of robots. The main difficulty is that the locations of the entities and the radio connectivities between the physical locations are not known in advance. We represent the problem by a topological graph of locations with known access links but unknown radio links and develop a novel ANCHOR algorithm for a set of autonomous robots to discover radio links dynamically and self-organize a radio network to connect the given entities with the least number of robots. We show in simulation analysis the algorithm scale near-linearly with maximum number of connected hops away from the terminals. Experiment also shows performance improvement with increasing number of robots.