Minimizing mobility and communication energy in robotic networks: An optimal control approach

This paper concerns the problem of minimizing the sum of motion energy and communication energy in a network of mobile robots. The robotic network is charged with the task of transmitting sensor information from a given object to a remote station, and it has to arrange itself in a serial (tandem) configuration for point-to-point transmission, where each robot acts as a relay node. The problem is formulated in a dynamic setting where the robots move and communicate at the same time, and it is cast in the framework of optimal control. The paper proposes an effective algorithm for solving this problem and demonstrates its efficacy on a simulation example. In order to highlight the salient features of the algorithm the network is assumed to be one-dimensional, and the case of planar movement with obstacles is deferred to future research.