The focus of this project is the networking of intelligent, autonomous swarms. The typical application scenario is a disaster area that requires the intervention of police, firemen, paramedics etc, but where the unfriendly environment bars direct access. The swarm establishes a communications network between the rescue teams and all critical fixed and mobile sensors and actuators in the disaster area. In the aftermath of a disaster typically some disconnected "islands" of sensors, monitors and actuators have survived the impact. A rapidly deployed swarm of air/ground agents reestablishes network connectivity, restores access to critical sensor probes, installs new probes as necessary and helps the collection and filtering of relevant data. This goal is achieved with the concurrent interworking of several elements: agile, programmable radios that can work in adverse, highly heterogeneous conditions; flexible network protocols for swarm to swarm communications and for "mobile backbone" deployment; adaptive video streaming, and; advanced vision processing for location and motion estimation. Scientific contributions and broader impacts will include: (1) robust, reconfigurable Mobile Backbone design methodology for emergency networking (2) modular, flexible, programmable MAR radio technology for unfriendly/hostile scenarios. (3) real time video streaming and "delayed" forwarding. (4) In-swarm processing of video data for image registration and mosaicing, including partial 3-D reconstruction and matching to existing blueprint and mapping data (5) Region-of-interest computation for visual odometry and swarm configuration refinement
