Cooperative communication in ad hoc networked mobile robots

This work addresses the problem of multi-mobile robot cooperation with strict communication constraints which are considered indispensable for successful task execution. The problem, which is instantiated as a cooperative search and rescue task, is modeled as a minimization of an energy functional which accounts for network connectivity and other relevant robot and task requirements in order to select locally optimal actions for each robot. The model is tested against several scenarios and the results produce elegant and rather efficient solutions to the proposed problem, albeit not globally optimal.