Topology design for router networks to accomplish a cooperative exploring task

It is a new challenge in robotics to enable robots with limited communication and sensing capabilities to accomplish complex group tasks. An emerging research is that a robot equipped with wireless network modules acts as a mobile router to bridge the communications of among the robot network. How to configure the robot network topology adaptively to fulfill both the task allocation and execution requirements is still remain unsolved. In this paper, we aim to address this challenging problem by developing a dynamic hierarchic backbone chain-cluster network topology for the robot network. The proposed network topology can be reconfigured adaptively and the reachability of the mobile user can be enhanced. Simulations are performed on a group of mobile robots to demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposed approach.