Army researchers enhance communications with robots and resolve unmanned conflicts on the battlefield

May 10, 2021
The technique uses a geometric approximation to group regions in which a robot can communicate with other robots using multi-hop communications.

ADELPHI, Md. – U.S. Army researchers developed a technique that enables robots to remain resilient when faced with intermittent communications losses on the battlefield. EurekAlert reports. Continue reading original article

The Military & Aerospace Electronics take:

10 May 2021 -- The technique, called a-shape, provides an efficient method for resolving goal conflicts between multiple robots that may want to visit the same area during missions like unmanned search and rescue, robotic reconnaissance, perimeter surveillance, and robotic detection of physical phenomena like radiation and underwater concentration of life forms.

Researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory and the University of Nebraska, Omaha Computer Science Department collaborated, which led to a paper featured in ScienceDirect's journal Robotics and Autonomous Systems.

The robot that remembers a task is based on the topology of their wireless communications network and the geometric layout of the robots, he said. Each robot is assigned a bounding shape representing the area of the environment that they are caching goal locations for, which enables a quick search in the communications network to find the robot that would know if there were any goals requested in that area.

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John Keller, chief editor
Military & Aerospace Electronics

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