Robust Geospatial Coordination of Multi-Agent Communications Networks Under Attrition

Abstract

Coordinating emergency responses in extreme environments, such as wildfires, requires resilient and high-bandwidth communication backbones. While autonomous aerial swarms can establish ad-hoc networks to provide this connectivity, the high risk of individual node attrition in these settings often leads to network fragmentation and mission-critical downtime. To overcome this challenge, we introduce and formalize the problem of Robust Task Networking Under Attrition (RTNUA), which extends connectivity maintenance in multi-robot systems to explicitly address proactive redundancy and attrition recovery. We then introduce Physics-Informed Robust Employment of Multi-Agent Networks (<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\Phi$</tex-math></inline-formula>IREMAN), a topological algorithm leveraging physics-inspired potential fields to solve this problem. In our evaluations, <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\Phi$</tex-math></inline-formula>IREMAN consistently outperforms baselines, and is able to maintain greater than 99.9% task uptime despite substantial attrition in simulations with up to 100 tasks and 500 drones, demonstrating both effectiveness and scalability.