Optimal Placement and Patrolling of Autonomous Vehicles in Visibility-Based Robot Networks
This addresses connectivity challenges for mobile units in communication-denied environments, but appears incremental with specific algorithmic improvements.
The paper tackles the problem of planning optimal placements and trajectories for autonomous vehicles to maintain Line-of-Sight connectivity with dispersed units in obstacle-filled environments, proposing centralized and distributed algorithms for verification and maintenance.
In communication-denied or contested environments, Line-of-Sight (LoS) communication (e.g free space optical communication using infrared or visible light) becomes one of the most reliable and efficient ways to send information between geographically scattered mobile units. In this paper, we consider the problem of planning optimal locations and trajectories for a group of autonomous vehicles to see a set of units that are dispersed in an environment with obstacles. The contributions of the paper are the following: 1) We propose centralized and distributed algorithms to verify that the vehicles and units form a connected network through LoS; 2) We present an algorithm that can maintain visibility-based connectivity, if possible, by relocating a single vehicle; and 3) We study the computational