An experimental study of exploiting multipath fading for robot communications

Abstract

A simple approach for mobile robots to exploit multipath fading in order to improve received radio signal strength (RSS), is presented. The strategy is to sample the RSS at discrete points, without deviating too far from the desired position. We first solve the problem of how many samples are needed for given communications performance and how they should be spaced. Second, we propose a circular and a grid trajectory for sampling and give lower bounds on how many samples they will yield. Third, we estimate the parameters of our strategy from measurements. Finally we demonstrate the validity of our analysis through experiments.