A wireless communication protocol for distributed robotics applications

Abstract

Wireless communication is necessary in any multi-robot application which is carried out in the real world. Sometimes a single access point that connects all the units is enough but often support for multi-hop communication is needed to avoid the mobility limitations that centralized routing entails. However, common communication protocols do not have native support for multi-hop communication and must rely on upper layer routing protocols. Nevertheless, these protocols have not been designed to manage high mobility nor flows priority and often offer insufficient performance in scenarios with this kind of requisites. In this paper we present a wireless protocol specifically designed for communication in distributed robotics systems and capable of managing high mobility of nodes while maintaining good performance in terms of fairness and end-to-end delivery delay.