Towards A Parallel Wireless Radio Communication Architecture for Modular Robots

Abstract

Provisioning a scalable communication architecture in self-reconfiguring (SR) modular robots is one of the major challenges in their large-scale implementation in hardware. The infrared and hardwired communication systems usually employed are complex, are unreliable, and can lead to unrecoverable errors. Wireless mesh networks offer a robust and versatile solution but do not scale in terms of bandwidth and latency. By exploiting the unique properties of modular robots, we address the scalability problem in this paper. We propose a novel multi-radio, multi-channel mesh network architecture that guarantees fixed bandwidth and latency for inter-module communication, independent of the robot size. We present experimental results using modified ZigBee radios in a well-controlled setup that is free from unpredictable properties of radio propagation such as multi-path interference. By eliminating variables that would otherwise be present in a practical environment, we are able to precisely validate the principles and assumptions of our architecture. Using results from our experiments as a baseline we also qualitatively show that our approach has in-built protection from multi-path interference. 1