A directional antenna based leader–follower relay system for end-to-end robot communications

Abstract

In this paper, we present a directional antenna-based leader-follower robotic relay system capable of building end-toend communication in complicated and dynamically changing environments. The proposed system consists of multiple networked robots -one is a mobile end node and the others are leaders or followers acting as radio relays. Every follower uses directional antennas to relay a communication radio and to estimate the location of the leader robot as a sensory device. For bearing estimation, we employ a weight centroid algorithm (WCA) and present a theoretical analysis of the use of WCA for this work. Using a robotic convoy method, we develop online, distributed control strategies that satisfy the scalability requirements of robotic network systems and enable cooperating robots to work independently. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated by conducting extensive real-world experiments that successfully build actual communication between two end nodes.

Empirical Analysis of Bi-directional Wi-Fi Network Performance on Mobile Robots in Indoor Environments

“…A high RSSI value (closer to −20dBm) means a stable and good connection, while a low RSSI value (closer to −80dBm) means a poor connection that could be lost anytime. The RSSI measurements are crucial to several robotaided applications, including robot and AP localization, and positioning the robot for improving connectivity [18], [12].…”

“…Researchers focused on improving the network performance through hardware innovations such as intelligent antenna [12], [13], algorithmic improvements such as optimized routing [14], [15], mobility-based methods such as the use of relay robots [16]. However, there is currently no work that provides a comprehensive framework for measuring and analyzing network performance on robots, especially coupled with the Robot Operating Systems (ROS) [17], which is a widely-used software development middleware framework in the robotics research community.…”

Communicating Multi-UAV System for Cooperative SLAM-based Exploration

“…More recently, the emphasis moved to robot coordination and cooperation. Multi-robot systems are mainly composed of three complementary components -perception [42], planning and control [1], and communications [23] that interact together to get a consistent and robust system. One of the main challenges of the perception component is the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) where no global positioning system is used.…”