No abstract

Mobile robots are being increasingly used to gather information from disaster sites and prevent further damage in disaster areas. Previous studies discussed a multi-robot system that uses a multistage relay backbone network to gather information in a closed space after a disaster. In this system, the mobile robot explores its search range by switching the connected nodes. Here it is necessary to maintain the communication quality required for the teleoperation of the mobile robot and to send and receive packets between the operator PC and the mobile robot. However, the mobile robot can become isolated when it is not able to maintain the communication quality required for teleoperations in the communication path after changing the nodes. This paper proposes a method to change the communication path of a mobile robot while maintaining its communication connectivity. In the proposed method, the mobile robot changes its route while maintaining communication connectivity without any communication loss time by connecting to two nodes.

No abstract

This paper describes an information gathering system comprising multiple mobile robots and a wireless sensor network. In general, a single robot searches an environment using a teleoperation system in a multistage relay network while maintaining communication quality. However, the search range of a single robot is limited, and it is difficult to gather comprehensive information in large-scale facilities. This paper proposes a multistage relay network topology using IEEE802.11ax for information gathering by multi-robot. In this multi-robot operation, a mobile robot carries wireless relay nodes and deploys them into the environment. After a network is constructed, each robot connects to this network and gathers information. An operator then controls each robot remotely while monitoring its end-to-end communication quality with each mobile robot in the network. This paper proposes a method assuming the end-to-end throughput with multiple mobile robots. The validity of the proposed method is then inspected via an evaluation experiment on multi-robot teleoperation. The experimental results show that the network constructed with the proposed topology is capable of maintaining the communication connectivity of more than three mobile robots.