RELINK: Real-Time Line-of-Sight-Based Deployment Framework of Multi-Robot for Maintaining a Communication Network

Abstract

In this letter, we study the problem of using mobile robots as relay nodes to keep moving clients and a fixed base station connected. Some applications, such as exploration and rescue, require this problem to be solved. However, existing methods are computationally time-consuming and insufficient to be deployed in real time due to the combinatorial nature of the problem. To bridge this gap, RELINK, a real-time line-of-sight-based deployment framework for communication maintenance using a multi-robot system is proposed. The framework firstly adopts a tree spanning algorithm to get a feasible guiding tree in the discretized space. The combinatorial nature of the problem is hence eliminated by the guiding tree, and a minimum-communication-loss and energy-efficient solution is generated using the star convex polytope-based optimization. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method.