Commbots: Distributed control of mobile communication relays
Brian P. Gerkey, Roger Mailler, Benoit Morisset · 2006
Digital wireless communication networks are vital in modern life. However, these networks rely on centralized infrastr ucture that is extremely vulnerable to disaster or attack. We s eek to improve the communication environment in post-disaster scenarios by developing groups of mobile communication relay robots, or commbots, that can be deployed to replace damaged infrastructure. The job of a commbot is to position itself so as to maximize overall network performance, which presents a rich and complex distributed learning and control problem. We have implemented three distributed algorithms and have tested them in simulation on a variety of instances of the commbots problem. We present results from these simulations and compare and contrast the different approaches.