Connectivity Service for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

We present a distributed connectivity service that allows agents in a mobile ad-hoc network to move while preserving connectivity. This allows unmodified motion planning algorithms to control the trajectories of each robot independently, these trajectories are fed to the service which modifies them as little as possible to ensuring global connectivity. Since we require only short term targets the service can be used with online motion planning where the complete trajectory is not known a priori. For most motions the algorithm requires only local knowledge of the graph, and therefore scales up with the number of agents.