Towards the deployment of a mobile robot network with end-to-end performance guarantees

Communication is essential for coordination in most cooperative control and sensing paradigms. In this paper, we present an experimental study of strategies for maintaining end-to-end communication links for tasks such as surveillance and search and rescue where team connectivity is essential for providing situational awareness to a base station. We consider the differences between monitoring point-to-point signal strength versus data throughput and present experimental results with our multi-robot testbed in outdoor environments