Design of a networked robotic system capable of enhancing wireless communication capabilities

Abstract

In this paper, we present the design of a networked robotic system capable of enhancing wireless communication capabilities. The core of the system is active antenna tracking with directional antennas. The proposed system is decentralized and consists mainly of a mobile robot system and a command center system. Each system is equipped with off-the-shelf network devices such as antennas, access points (AP), and network switches. For directional antennas to be beneficial to our system, we propose a weighted centroid algorithm (WCA), which is a method for active antenna tracking and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. Through extensive field experiments in different environments and with different antenna selections, such as omni-to-omni, omni-to-directional, directional-to-directional antennas, we demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed system. We expect that our system can be applied in a variety of rescue, surveillance, and emergency scenarios where high bandwidth and long distance communications are needed.