Dynamic Adaptive Wireless Networks with Autonomous Robot Nodes PROJECT SUMMARY.pdfVIP

Dynamic Adaptive Wireless Networks with Autonomous Rob ot No des PROJECT SUMMARY Keywords Wireless networks autonomous mobile rob ots self conguring networks Multihop wireless capabilities will enable communication and co ordination among autonomous no des in unplanned environments and congurations At the same time wireless channels present challenges of dynamic op erating conditions p ower constraints for autonomouslyp owered no des and complicating interactions b etween high level b ehavior and lower level channel characteristics eg increased synchronized communication will signicantly degrade channel characteristics The ma jor goal of the research prop osed here is the development testing and characterization of algorithms for scalable applicationdriven wireless network services using a heterogeneous col lection of communicating mobile no des Some of these no des will b e autonomous rob ots in that their movements will not b e human controlled The others will b e p ortable thus making them dep endent on humans for transp ortation While the fo cus of our work is on the mobile no des we include immobile computers on the network as well We emphasize that most though not all of the mobile no des will have mo dest sensing computational and communication resources The collection as a whole is an example of a sensor network The chief scientic motivation b ehind our work is the design of robust ecient and scalable algorithms We hyp othesize that distributed algorithms that rely on lo cal interactions have many comp elling characteristics resulting in these prop erties There is signicant overlap b etween the problems of co ordinating the autonomous mobile no des that carry some of the sensors and the algorit