A Directional Antenna based Leader-Follower Relay System for End-to-End Robot Communications

摘要

In this paper, we present a directional antenna-based leader-follower roboticrelay system capable of building end-to-end communication in complicated anddynamically changing environments. The proposed system consists of multiplenetworked robots - one is a mobile end node and the others are leaders orfollowers acting as radio relays. Every follower uses directional antennas torelay a communication radio and to estimate the location of the leader robot asa sensory device. For bearing estimation, we employ a weight centroid algorithm (WCA) andpresent a theoretical analysis of the use of WCA for this work. Using a roboticconvoy method, we develop online, distributed control strategies that satisfythe scalability requirements of robotic network systems and enable cooperatingrobots to work independently. The performance of the proposed system isevaluated by conducting extensive real-world experiments that successfullybuild actual communication between two end nodes.