An energy saving robot mobility diversity algorithm for wireless communications

Abstract

There are emerging applications in which a robot must explore some physical area or do some surveillance task and then communicate with a base station (BS) to transmit its information. Often this working environment has rich scattering and so the wireless channel will experience small scale fading. In this paper we develop an algorithm whereby the robot visits a specific number of locations with a pre-determined geometry, and transmits its data from one of these locations in an optimum way that minimizes the overall energy consumption. We show analytically (and via simulation) that this approach can both reduce the total energy required and obtain a diversity gain for robotic wireless communications.