Hardware Testbed for Collaborative Robotics using Wireless Communication

Abstract

Collaborating mobile robots equipped with WiFi transceivers are configured as a mobile ad-hoc network. Search and rescue algorithms are developed to take advantage of the distributed processing capability inherent to multi-agent systems. The focus of this study is to investigate the effect of team size on target acquisition performance with the amount of inter-robot communication as a parameter. A hardware testbed is described which is used to examine these trade-offs in an indoor laboratory-scale test area. Tests involving up to five robots employing three different amounts of communication are performed. The results show that increased communication significantly reduces the overall number of steps to find a target, and that while inter-robot interference is a significant factor regardless of the amount of communication which occurs, more communication leads to less interference.