A Practical Implementation of Multi-Radio Wi-Fi for Teleoperated Mobile Robots

Abstract

We propose a multi-radio Wi-Fi communication system that can be easily integrated into a mobile robot and provide stable communication using multiple Wi-Fi devices. In the proposed system, Multi-Radio Controller (MRC) and Multi-Link Manager (MLM) hide multi-radio communication from the computer units of a mobile robot in such a way that each computer unit does not need to be aware of multi-radio communication. We implement the proposed system in a real teleoperation system using mobile robots and confirm that our proposed system works stably through a two-day demonstration at a real event site. We also confirm that our proposed system has lower latency communication than a single radio Wi-Fi based system through field tests.