Emergency Communication in Challenged Environments via Unmanned Ground and Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are promising assets to support rescue operations in natural or man-made disasters. Most UGVs and UAVs deployed in the field today depend on human operators and reliable network connections to the vehicles. However, network connections in challenged environments are often lost, thus control can no longer be exercised. In this paper, we present a novel approach to emergency communication where semi-autonomous UGVs and UAVs cooperate with humans to dynamically form communication islands and establish communication bridges between these islands. Humans typically form an island with their mobile devices if they are in physical proximity; UGVs and UAVs extend an island's range by carrying data to a neighboring island. The proposed approach uses delay/disruption-tolerant networking for non-time critical tasks and direct mesh connections for prioritized tasks that require real-time feedback. The developed communication platform runs on rescue robots, commodity mobile devices, and various drones, and supports our operations and control center software for disaster management.