Autonomous WiFi-relay control with mobile robots

Stable communication plays an important role in autonomous applications with mobile robots, especially in the environments without communication infrastructures. There are high demands for quickly building wireless communication network for robots. To ensure stable wireless communication, the bottleneck of the data transmission is needed eliminating to make the communication ability best amongst base station, mobile robots and clients. The paper proposes an efficient approach to address the problem, by equipping WiFi routers on robots to enable and enhance communication ability. Two WiFi models are first introduced to assist the navigation of relay robots. A visual-laser SLAM is proposed to build the environmental map and further localize the relay robots. The RRT-based motion planning method is utilized to find the relay locations with best communication ability. The mobile relay robots are then controlled automatically to the corresponding target locations, setting up ad-hoc wireless network with good quality. Finally, experimental results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.