Designing the MIMO SDR-based LPD transceiver for long-range robot control applications

Abstract

There is a huge growth in robot control applications over the past years. One of the main challenges in such applications is the radio link between a control point and a robot. To improve the range of the link most available control systems use 433 MHz Low Power Devices (LPD) band for communication. Required distance between a robot and control point for our application is 10 km. Achieving this distance is a challenge when multipath propagation is present. Our Matlab simulation demonstrates that 2*2 Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) Alamouti scheme allows to gain more than 10 dB comparing with Single Input Single Output (SISO). Link budget calculations show that we can achieve even more than 10 km distance using 2*2 MIMO scheme. High precision Agilent hardware and SystemVue software were used for performance evaluation of the radio link and system architecture. To prototype the system we used USRP B210 Software Defined Radio (SDR) hardware due to huge variety of supportive platforms and convenient type of connectivity.