A SPACE-DIVISION WIRELESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEM FOR ADHOC NETWORKING AND COOPERATIVE LOCALIZATION OF MULTIPLE MOBILE ROBOTS

This paper presents a space-division wireless communication system for nonhierarchical, cooperative control of multiple mobile robots. The proposed communication system has the following features: 1) it has a set of infrared transceivers arranged on the circumference of the robot body to communicate in all directions; 2) it can maintain communication links by exchanging transceivers when either of the robots runs and/or rotates. An arbiter is introduced to reduce communication interference when two or more robots are in the same communication area. Adhoc communication networks are constructed based on the selection of arbiters. As an example of distributed sensing and cooperation using the system, cooperative localization of communicating mobile robots is also described. Some performance measurements using an experimental system have been carried out to show the viability of the proposed approach.