Coordinated control of mobile antennas for ad hoc networks

This paper investigates the implementation of a wireless mobile ad hoc network to guarantee that an autonomous agent (an autonomously driven mobile vehicle or a human), remains connected to a fixed base station while performing its own mission. To this purpose, the use of a platoon of mobile robots is proposed to carry a number of repeater antennas; these are suitably moved to dynamically ensure a multi hop communication link to the moving agent, hence extending and adapting the area covered by the sole base station. Self-configuration of the robots' platoon is achieved by a singularity-robust task-priority inverse kinematics algorithm via the definition of suitable task functions. The obtained simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.