Connectivity in a wireless network of mobile robots doing a searching and collecting task

This work presents a computer simulation study on the reliability of the wireless connection between a base station and a robot swarm busy in a searching and collecting task. The size of the searched area supposed to be much bigger that the wireless coverage of a robot, so the communication is modeled by a multi-hop ad hoc network. We use the idea of dividing the area into working cells, in which the robots perform an exhaustive search simultaneously. In this work the working cells are arranged in a lattice geometry bounded inside a slice of a disk. It was found that the expected value of the longest time while the communication network is disconnected increases exponentially with the radius of the searched area but does not depend considerably on the spatial density of the searched items. Besides, the robots traveling on the way to or back from the base station contribute remarkably to the connectivity of the multi-hop network.