Title: Keeping Mobile Robots Connected
Speaker: Alex Cornejo (MIT)
Place: 32-G531
Time:   1-2:30pm
Date:   Friday March 6th, 2009

Summary:
I will describe and prove the safety and progress guarantees of a
distributed algorithm for keeping a mobile robot swarms connected.
Informally each robot is embedded in Euclidean space and wants to
perform a task which may require communication with some subset of the
other robots and moving around. We designed an algorithm which sits
between the motion planner and the network layer and modifies the
trajectories of each robot to guarantee connectivity. Even though
connectivity is a global property of the graph, the algorithm uses only
local information. Furthermore, since motion planning occurs in
Euclidean space, most proofs require geometrical reasoning.