Connectivity Maintenance for High-Speed Communication with Adversarial Jamming

Abstract

We consider the problem of adaptively controlling a fleet of robots to maintain a communication network in an adversarial environment. In particular, a network team of robots is tasked with maintaining a directed communication channel at some data rate from an independent task robot to a fixed base station , accommodating the task robot's motion and adversarial intervention in the form of an omnidirectional jammer and network team robot removals. We utilize a physically-motivated model for directed signal strength between robots in the presence of a jammer, introducing asymmetry into communication which challenges connectivity maintenance approaches. Our main contribution in this paper is the introduction of a strategy for translating this directed model into an undirected graph for which enforcing connectedness is sufficient for maintaining high-rate communication. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in simulation using a CBF-based controller, showing that our controller maintains a high-rate connection throughout diverse trajectories, even when more conservative controllers fail.