keep in touch with mother

A swarm of robots has a parent unit and does not require input from its command unit, but
subordinate units of the swarm can determine if leadership is required. Fink points out that this
system, dubbed his Breadcrumb-style Dynamically Deployed Communication Network
Paradigma (DDCN), works in two ways. A passive parent unit can gather information on the
surface while its descendants explore underground, or the parent unit can directly control the
rover's operations and movements.

A Hansel and Gretal-inspired system allows him to handle one of the biggest challenges
associated with sending autonomous units to explore the underground of an alien world. It's
about recovering the data collected by the rover and feeding it back to the surface. DDCN
enables constant data transfer as each robot in the swarm communicates with its “mother” even
in a twisty and complex environment. The searching abilities of these robots can be further
enhanced by equipping each unit with a light detection and ranging system, or lidar. This allows
robots to map cave systems in 3D, creating networks that can be used by the entire swarm.

"They can switch themselves to compensate for dead spots and signal dropouts," says study
co-author Mark Tarbell, a senior research scientist in Fink's lab. "Even if some of them die, the
connection is maintained through the remaining nodes, so Motherhis rover will never lose
connection to the most distant nodes in the network."