Optimizing movement and communication for autonomous mobile entities

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Unprecedented technological advances in a variety of fields have brought us increasingly closer to the contemporary vision of the Internet of Things (IoT). It is estimated that in the next five years, over 50 billion devices or things will be connected to the Internet. Most of these things will have embedded inside them, sensors that collect data about their environment and use wireless networking technology to communicate with each other and enable smart decision-making. In the smart cities of the future, sensors embedded in cars, roads and and parking lots will improve daily life by finding parking and avoiding congested routes on the fly; in our homes will enable reduction of energy costs; in healthcare settings will save lives by continuous monitoring of patients; in industrial and commercial settings will improve productivity, to name but a few applications. All this will be achieved with machine-to-machine communication involving little to no human interaction. The potential capabilities of autonomous devices connecting to each other seamlessly are greatly enhanced by the fact that these devices may be mobile, whether they are wearable devices, or they are robot swarms working on a construction site, or they are in driver-less cars. Billions of dollars are being invested by governments and top technology companies worldwide on realizing some of these applications. Many scientific and engineering challenges remain to be solved before the much-heralded vision of smart cities and the Internet of Things can be realized. My research centers on fundamental questions of efficient communication and collaboration between mobile autonomous devices, such as wireless sensors and mobile robots, that are critical to realizing the above applications. Communication in multi-hop wireless networks is very challenging as it necessitates both route-finding and interference-free scheduling of transmissions over multiple links. We need to study fundamental questions of how, when, and what to communicate. Adding mobility to wireless devices expands the range of possible applications but at the same time adds a whole new dimension to the challenge involved. What advantages can we gain from controlled mobility; what are the optimal trajectories to be taken by these autonomous mobile devices to achieve certain tasks? The objectives of this proposal are to focus on the aspect of movement, and to design optimal trajectories and communication strategies for collaborating mobile sensors and robots. In particular, I plan: - to design efficient centralized and distributed algorithms for pattern formation by a set of mobile entities, such as mobile wireless sensors. - to design efficient algorithms for data gathering in multi-hop networks of mobile sensors. - to design efficient trajectories for a set of autonomous mobile robots to collaborate on tasks such as searching and transporting objects of interest.