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arXiv · 2512.06207

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

Harshil Suthar·Dipankar Maity
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Abstract

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.

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Harshil Suthar, Dipankar Maity. 2025-12-05. Where to Fly, What to Send: Communication-Aware Aerial Support for Ground Robots. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06207

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