Autonomous mobile networks

Summary form only given, as follows. Autonomous mobile networks are distributed ad-hoc networks of nodes that can sense, actuate, compute and communicate with each other using point-to-point multi-hop communication. The nodes in such networks include static sensors, mobile sensors, robots, and humans. Such systems combine the most advanced concepts in perception, communication and control to create computational systems capable of large-scale interaction with the environment, extending the individual capabilities of each network component to encompass a much wider area and range of data. We discuss communication, control and information processing in networked robots. Due to the absence of any networking infrastructure, the nodes must cooperate to accomplish communication, global control and distributed information aggregation. We present distributed algorithms for routing messages that use mobility to guarantee message delivery, distributed algorithms for aggregating maps and using the maps to guide navigation, and some recent results on information diffusion.