Maintaining Communication Link for Tactical Ground Robots

2007 IEEE International Workshop on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics, 2007

This paper proposes the use of a platoon of mobile robots to carry a number of repeater antennas in order to guarantee a constant communication between a rescue operator (human or robot) and a fixed base station. These mobile antennas suitably move to dynamically ensure a multi-hop communication link, handling the occurrence of obstacles, signal fading area and failures such as, e.g., the fault of one or more mobile robots. The control objective is achieved in the framework of a kind of behavioral control, namely the Null-Space-based Behavioral control (NSB). The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is verified in preliminary experiments obtained using a platoon of Khepera II mobile robots.

2008

A client-server application for the remote control of a wireless mobile robot (a small four-wheel vehicle) is described. The application requires an onboard computer (e.g. a PC-104 or a laptop) running a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) on the vehicle. The mobile robot is the client, which is controlled by the server. The server can be any desktop machine or another mobile robot. We show how mobile robots can be controlled using any computer on the internet through a wireless Ethernet network. This project uses commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software. The ultimate goal of this effort is to build autonomous or semi-autonomous airborne vehicles which can run with little or no human intervention, but for the time being we are working with ground-base vehicles to develop the hardware and software. A small traditional radio-controlled aircraft (e.g. 2 meter wing span) could easily carry the computer required by the client. The approach we are using essentially gives the power of large desktop or Beowulf clusters to very small mobile robots, since the client is a complete internet-based PC. The client is basically an intelligent agent. This approach can be extended to allow multiple vehicles to communicate with each other and with other computers on the internet. This is not an approach that can be used for real-time remote control of airborne vehicles, but it is expected to be useful for autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles, where it would be useful to occasionally send commands to the vehicle. This approach will also allow very powerful computers such as Beowulf clusters or parallel supercomputers to be used to control numerous mobile robots, since they too can act as servers.

The International Journal of Robotics Research, 1999

Today’s regional military conflicts are increasingly likely to occur in populated urban areas, in, around, over, and under unknown buildings. This places land forces in dangerous and unpredictable situations, and in many instances the conflicts also threaten noncombatants. To address this need, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Tactical Mobile Robotics program is researching and developing the capability to perform urban reconnaissance with teams of small, low-cost, semiautonomous mobile robots. Easily transportable by individuals, these robot teams will be capable of working together to perform a variety of reconnaissance functions. The program develops enabling technologies (machine perception, autonomous operation, and robotic locomotion) and integrates them into tactical systems for urban operations.

APCC 2012 - 18th Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications: "Green and Smart Communications for IT Innovation", 2012

In ad hoc networks, wireless links are subject to a low quality due to time-varying channel properties, node mobility, and obstacles. Such low quality wireless links lead to the degraded performance of the end-to-end data transfer service, which also result in less applicability of ad hoc networks to practical deployment. In order to address the problem of low quality wireless links and provide a required quality for end-to-end data transfer services, we propose a novel routing and relaying architecture that exploits controllable mobility of robotic relays, namely RoCoMAR (Robots' Controllable Mobility Aided Routing), which repeatedly reinforces wireless links with the main objective of maximizing the network throughput. RoCoMAR first identifies the lowest quality link and replaces it with high quality links that are created by re-locating a robotic relay in an optimal position. The simulation results show that RoCoMAR outperforms existing ad hoc routing protocols in terms of network throughput and end-to-end delay.

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are communication networks that do not rely on fixed, preinstalled communication devices like base stations or predefined communication cells. MANETs are wireless networks consisting of mobile nodes which are characterized by their decentralized organization and the potentially high dynamics of the network structure. Therefore, MANETs are ideally suitable for applications with multi-robot systems. One of the most promising applications of a multi-robot system is to assist humans in urban search and rescue (USAR) scenarios in the aftermath of natural or man-made disasters. We are focusing on an ad-hoc network communication system with the mobile robots being communication nodes offering a robust communication infrastructure. Main disaster scenario covered by our system is a large industrial warehouse in fire, described in the GUARDIANS project funded by the European Union. In this scenario, black smoke may fill large space of the warehouse that makes it very difficult for the firefighters to orientate themselves in the building which in turn will usually limit the action space of the firefighters. In order to increase the coverage area of the fire fighters the ad-hoc network has to provide position data to support localization of the mobile robots and humans, which might be of great importance to guide the humans and robots to specific targets and locations or to quickly exit the search area.

2006

Tactical mobile robots used in military and law enforcement operations normally require a robust, long range, and non-line-of-sight communications link to the remote control station. High frequency digital communications, which overcome problems encountered ...

— In this paper, we solve the problem of relay robot placement in multi-robot missions to establish or enhance communication between a static operator and a number of remote units in an environment with known obstacles. We study the hardness of two different relay placement problems: 1) a chain formation of multiple relay robots to transmit information from an operator to a single unit; and 2) a spanning tree of relays connecting multiple remote units to the operator. We first build a communication map data structure from a layered graph that contains the positions of the relays as the unit moves. This structure is computed once and reused throughout the mission, significantly reducing plan re-computation time when compared to the best known solution in the literature. Second, we create a min-arborescence tree that forms a connected component among the operator, relays, and units, and that has an optimal communication cost. Finally, we validate our ideas through software simulations, hardware experiments, and a comparison of our approach to state-of-the-art approaches.

Telecommunication Systems, 2000

We consider the problem of coverage and exploration of an unknown dynamic environment using a mobile robot. The environment is assumed to be large enough such that constant motion by the robot is needed to cover the environment. We present an efficient minimalist algorithm which assumes that global information is not available (neither a map, nor GPS). Our algorithm deploys a network of radio beacons which assists the robot in coverage. The network is also used by the robot for navigation. The deployed network can also be used for applications other than coverage (such as multi-robot task allocation). Simulation experiments are presented which show the collaboration between the deployed network and mobile robot for the tasks of coverage/exploration, network deployment and maintenance (repair), and mobile robot recovery (homing behavior). We discuss a theoretical basis for our algorithm on graphs and show the results of the simulated scenario experiments.

2020

1Vidyalankar Institute Of Technology, Information Technology Department, Wadala, Mumbai 2Vidyalankar Institute Of Technology, Information Technology Department, Wadala, Mumbai 3Vidyalankar Institute Of Technology, Information Technology Department, Wadala, Mumbai ---------------------------------------------------------------------***---------------------------------------------------------------------Abstract Generally many risky, unmanageable and various tasks are difficult to handle by human. Thus there is need for something, which can be physically present and handle the task. So, robot can be much effective and useful option for such risky tasks. Nowadays in industries, medical, colleges, home appliances, restaurants, military and defense, robot plays very important role and make the task easier and efficient. The proposed work is to design and develop for military application.

Mobile Robots - Control Architectures, Bio-Interfacing, Navigation, Multi Robot Motion Planning and Operator Training, 2011

Using a Meeting Channel and Relay Nodes to Interconnect Mobile Robots 3 performance of the whole system. Indeed, if the communications between mobiles and the intra-mobile communications are on the same channel, the competition for the medium is high. Reducing the bandwidth of intra-mobile communications can have a disastrous impact on the robot behavior, for instance if the coordinator is not able to inform quickly the actuators (such as brakes) to be operated. Thus, it is important to interconnect mobile robots using a multi-channel approach. 2.1 Multi-channel approaches Multi-channel approaches have the main advantage to reduce the contention on each communication channel, and thus to improve the performance of the system. In the literature, several multi-channel approaches have been proposed (