Tether monitoring techniques for environment monitoring, tether following and localization of autonomous mobile robots

Abstract

Autonomous robots can be tethered or untethered. For applications which are time-intensive or those which involve noisy environments, tethered robots are preferred. This is because tethers provide robust data communication and uninterrupted power delivery. Tether management is an important research domain, which has not been well explored. Our research work aims at devising tether management techniques to reduce the inherent problems associated with a tether and to obtain useful information about the robot and its environment. In this paper, tethers are used to monitor an environment, to localize a robot and to guide it back to the entry point. Experimental results show that proposed tether monitoring techniques are effective and open up several interesting avenues for further investigation.