Controlling Teams of Autonomous Mobile Beamformers

The goal of this project is to develop a new framework to control teams of mobile robots, cooperating in a beamforming fashion, to transmit information between multiple source-destination pairs, while meeting quality-of-service constraints and consuming minimum power. The approach of this project ensures robust communications and longevity in challenging environments, arising during the transmission of high-rate data, such as video or images, or in environments where there is no line-of-sight. It also allows significant performance gains compared to static systems that do not consider mobility. The intellectual merit of this research lies in the development of a cyber-physical system of mobile beamformers, where the physical space of robot trajectories and velocities constitutes an input to the cyber space of wireless communications, and vise versa. This is a collaborative project with Duke (Lead) and Rutgers. Our project tasks are related to the physical platform design, deployment and validation.