Where to Fly, What to Send: Communication-Aware Aerial Support for Ground Robots

In this work we consider a multi-robot team operating in an unknown environment where one aerial agent is tasked to map the environment and transmit (a portion of) the mapped environment to a group of ground agents that are trying to reach their goals. The entire operation takes place over a bandwidth-limited communication channel, which motivates the problem of determining what and how much information the assisting agent should transmit and when while simultaneously performing exploration/mapping. The proposed framework enables the assisting aerial agent to decide what information to transmit based on the Value-of-Information (VoI), how much to transmit using a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP), and how to acquire additional information through an utility score-based environment exploration strategy. We perform a communication-motion trade-off analysis between the total amount of map data communicated by the aerial agent and the navigation cost incurred by the ground agents.