Fast and Parallel Wireless Communication Backbone Deployment with Networked Robots

Disaster robotics have gained considerable attention in the last decade while providing support for the emergency teams in search and rescue operations. Here, we propose a system to support first responders, such as firefighters and police officers, by establishing a communication network connecting multiple clients. The clients are the access points for the rescue teams. The objective is to deploy robots equipped with communication devices in such a manner that the clients are able to communicate among themselves. We focus on minimizing the deployment time. Our approach allows to combine links when computing the backbone. Then, our proposed method decomposes the problem into a set of local communication networks that when solved connects all clients in a network. Unlike previous works, the deployment is done in parallel, which decreases the time to set up the network. Our method uses realistic communication metrics to determine the connectivity between devices and to deploy the robots in the environment. We show using both simulations and physical experiments the feasibility of our solution.