Wireless Network Issues for a Roaming Robot

摘要

This paper describes a work carried out at the Advanced Robotics Laboratory of the University of Brescia, which consisted in the project and the realization of a package to allow a mobile autonomous robot to manage the access to wireless TCP/IP networks by itself. With this software, the robot is able to look for an available communication channel and to establish a new connection to it, once found. Moreover, if the robot detects more than one network, it has the essential knowledge to choose the best one and to start communicating using that channel. The main goal of this project is to make the robot able to employ, always and everywhere, the best available way of communicating, by supplying it with the capability of deciding if the current connection is the best it could actually exploit, or if it would be useful to switch to another channel. This task is completed without any awareness of the context in which the robot is; this means that the robot can immediately start working in every new place it is located, with no need for reconfiguration.