Maintaining a solid radio communication link between a mobile robot entering a building and an external base station is a well-recognized problem. Modern digital radios, while affording high bandwidth and Internet-protocol-based automatic routing capabilities, tend to operate on line-of-sight links. The communication link degrades quickly as a robot penetrates deeper into the interior of a building. This project investigates the use of mobile autonomous communication relay nodes to extend the effective range of a mobile robot exploring a complex interior environment. Each relay node is a small mobile slave robot equipped with sonar, ladar, and 802.11b radio repeater. For demonstration purposes, four Pioneer 2-DX robots are used as autonomous mobile relays, with SSC-San Diego's ROBART III acting as the lead robot. The relay robots follow the lead robot into a building and are automatically deployed at various locations to maintain a networked communication link back to the remote operator. With their onboard external sensors, they also act as rearguards to secure areas already explored by the lead robot. As the lead robot advances and RF shortcuts are detected, relay nodes that become unnecessary will be reclaimed and reused, all transparent to the operator. This project takes advantage of recent research results from several DARPA-funded tasks at various institutions in the areas of robotic simulation, wireless ad hoc networking, route planning, and navigation. This paper describes the progress of the first six months of the project.Keywords: robotics, communications, RF, relays, 802.11, ad hoc networking OBJECTIVESOne of the vulnerabilities of current mobile robots operating in real-world scenarios is the communication link to the operator's console. Fiber-optic cables reduce mobility and often become entangled and broken, rendering the robot inoperable. User surveys have identified radio-frequency (RF) communications systems as more desirable.1,2 However, most RF communication systems currently employed on teleoperated robots in the field are analog, which very often experience signal interference, multipath, and attenuation problems when used in an urban environment. Spread spectrum digital systems are more immune to these problems and provide a level of transmission security, but operate at shorter ranges and mostly on line of sight.To extend the range of digital radios and provide non-line-of-sight service, the use of dropped static relays or autonomous robots as relays have been discussed, usually in the context of a larger project, from creating a network of distributed mobile sensors 3 to exploring for life on Mars. 4 Our project goal is to move this concept out of the discussion and simulation stages and demonstrate it using real hardware to solve a real-world problem.We want to automatically maintain a solid high-bandwidth digital RF communication link between a robot exploring a large indoor environment and the operator stationed outside the building. This task must be performed without operat...
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