Communication Issues in Distributed Multisensory Robotics

Communication Issues in Distributed Multisensory Robotics

The EU funded project ViewFinder aims at integrating mobile robots into a command and control network. These robots will be equipped with numerous perception sensors producing a lot of data that would have to be exchanged between different computers on the robots or over a wireless link. This paper presents the communication requirements of the ViewFinder project and reviews possible technical solutions. It describes and compares two software packages, namely CoRoBA and Mailman, that are used in the project. Results of communication performance of standard Wi-Fi and Wimax systems in typical ViewFinder environments are reported. Finally tailored solutions for solving communication issues are proposed.