Our capstone project will attempt to solve the problem of rescue operations in environments where local communication infrastructure has been destroyed without wide-scale road destruction. For example, a solar flare, wildfire, blackout, or aftermath of a flooding event (after the water has drained away). In particular, our capstone project will focus on the autonomous exploration of the environment for data collection for later processing at a stationary compute node for the purposes of looking for survivors and communication infrastructure establishment. For our capstone project, we will not focus on navigation through difficult terrain, and instead focus on network infrastructure
The north star of this project is to have many exploration robots with limited onboard compute explore a location and gather data. The data will then be sent back to a centralized static compute station to be processed. Because we are operating with the assumption that networking infrastructure is down, the robot will need to drop it’s routers as it explores the terrain to ensure that it can stay connected to the central compute station. If the connection is weak, the robot should be able to drive back to within wifi range of the centralized static compute station in order to offload it’s data.
This is mainly a research project exploring how to deploy scalable, protocol agnostic, mesh networks on the edge. Our emphasis in this project is on the robot (we will build our own) and the networking portion (routers and how to coordinate between many robots). This means that, for example, we will not focus on aspects such as the how to process in video the central compute station.
MVP: A single robot that is able to drop routers, and communicate with the centralized compute unit using both long range, low bandwidth protocols (LORA) and short range, high bandwidth protocols (WIFI).