  The paper present a novel approach for the solution of the Multi-Robot
Communication-Aware Trajectory Planning, which builds on a general optimisation
framework where the changes in robots positions are used as decision variable,
and linear constraints on the trajectories of the robots are introduced to
ensure communication performance and collision avoidance. The Fiedler value is
adopted as communication performance metric. The validity of the method in
computing both feasible and optimal trajectories for the robots is demonstrated
both in simulation and experimentally. Results show that the constraint on the
Fiedler value ensures that the robot network fulfils its objective while
maintaining communication connectivity at all times. Further, the paper shows
that the introduction of approximations for the constraints enables a
significant improvement in the computational time of the solution, which remain
very close to the optimal solution.
