MAGIC Robots - Resilient Communications: A Guaranteed Redundant Expansible Mesh Built on Unreliable Media

The Multiple Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge (MAGIC) provided a challenge in more respects than perhaps some of the organizers and the teams initially realized. There are problems in robotics, vision, navigation, teaming general artificial intelligence and mission-specific intelligence. One additional and critical challenge was the ability to maintain continuous communications in the complete or potential absence of infrastructure, in the presence of interference and over long distances. A related challenge was to develop an effective human robot interface that provided for assurance that robots were behaving appropriately, identify objects and targets correctly, and adopting appropriate strategies to neutralize hostiles, whilst requiring a minimum of interaction and under a no-teleoperation prohibition. This paper outlines the development and testing of the resilient communication system designed for our MAGIC robots.