Communication-aware planning for robot teams deployment

Abstract: In the present work we address the problem of deploying a team of robots in a scenario where some locations of interest must be reached. Thus, a planning for a deployment is required, before sending the robots. The obstacles, the limited communication range, and the need of communicating to a base station, constrain the connectivity of the team and the deployment planning. We propose a method consisting of three algorithms: a distributed path planner to obtain communication-aware trajectories; a deployment planner providing dual-use of the robots, visiting primary goals and performing connectivity tasks; and a clustering algorithm to allocate the tasks to robots, and obtain the best goal visit order for the mission. Keywords: Multi-robot systems, deployment planning, communication-aware planning 1. INTRODUCTION characterize the signal in the environment, considering the variations suffered by the signal in the propagation media. The deployment of robot teams for exploration or environmental monitoring can be executed in many ways.