Modern warfare is increasingly urban - when you're fighting small groups of anonymous guerrilla insurgents there's no pitched battlefields and American forces are finding that their radio communications are suffering in these Non-Line-Of-Sight environments. The solution? Squadrons of smart communications robots, or LANdroids, each the size of a deck of cards, that can be scattered through an urban environment to create a self-organizing mesh radio network. Each unit constantly repositions itself for maximal signal strength, and if a LANdroid is destroyed, the rest of the units will reposition themselves to restore communications. DARPA is soliciting proposals for intelligent autonomous radio relay nodes that are able to establish mesh networks in urban settings. Ideally, a LANdroid unit would consist of a robotic platform - small, inexpensive, smart, and mobile (as shown in the photoshop artist's conception above). Warfighters would carry lots of them (they should be roughly palm-size) and then drop them as they go. Together, the units would form a self-healing mesh network - multi-path, multi-hop and multiply connected. If a particular unit is taken out by the enemy (or possibly grabbed by some kid as a cool toy!), the network will route around the lost transmitter. The ability to set up small subnetworks that exchange data, monitor enemy data and allow better troop intercommunication is a major breakthrough and innovation.Modern warfare is increasingly urban - when you're fighting small groups of anonymous guerrilla insurgents there's no pitched battlefields and American forces are finding that their radio communications are suffering in these Non-Line-Of-Sight environments. The solution? Squadrons of smart communications robots, or LANdroids, each the size of a deck of cards, that can be scattered through an urban environment to create a self-organizing mesh radio network. Each unit constantly repositions itself for maximal signal strength, and if a LANdroid is destroyed, the rest of the units will reposition themselves to restore communications. DARPA is soliciting proposals for intelligent autonomous radio relay nodes that are able to establish mesh networks in urban settings. Ideally, a LANdroid unit would consist of a robotic platform - small, inexpensive, smart, and mobile (as shown in the photoshop artist's conception above). Warfighters would carry lots of them (they should be roughly palm-size) and then drop them as they go. Together, the units would form a self-healing mesh network - multi-path, multi-hop and multiply connected. If a particular unit is taken out by the enemy (or possibly grabbed by some kid as a cool toy!), the network will route around the lost transmitter. The ability to set up small subnetworks that exchange data, monitor enemy data and allow better troop intercommunication is a major breakthrough and innovation.
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