Extending Underground Wireless Communications for the Warfighter
Mary Hood, Michael L. Anderson, Joseph Anderson, Nicholas Black, Jedd Lebrilla, Joseph Puglisi, Colton Bassford · AIAA Scitech 2021 Forum · 2021
View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-0575.vid Recent advances have seen a rapid acceleration of the development of autonomous platforms to explore indoor facilities, especially for defense and security applications. However, a significant and largely unresolved drawback remains loss of communication signal with an outside operator following any significant penetration by the platform into the environment being explored. This project explores the ability to autonomously create and self-heal a mesh network of wireless communication repeaters to maintain signal between a forward-operating Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) exploring the indoor space and human operator on the exterior. This work proposes a system that uses a quad rotor UAS to deploy small, mobile pucks containing Wi-Fi-enabled microcomputers along its route within an indoor environment. In the event that one of these pucks becomes disabled, the other pucks rearrange to self-heal the network through a novel locomotion method. A prototype of the proposed system was developed and tested, successfully demonstrating subsystem functionality. The distributed communications network was able to extend wireless communication indoors, beyond line of sight, through several hallway corridors, and into multiple rooms.