To Mesh or not to Mesh: Flexible Wireless Indoor Communication Among Mobile Robots in Industrial Environments
Mobile robots such as automated guided vehicles become increasingly important in industry as they can greatly increase efficiency. For their operation such robots must rely on wireless communication, typically realized by connecting them to an existing en
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Abstract. Mobile robots such as automated guided vehicles become increasingly important in industry as they can greatly increase efficiency. For their operation such robots must rely on wireless communication, typically realized by connecting them to an existing enterprise network. In this paper we motivate that such an approach is not always economically viable or might result in performance issues. Therefore we propose a flexible and configurable mixed architecture that leverages on mesh capabilities whenever appropriate. Through experiments on a wireless testbed for a variety of scenarios, we analyse the impact of roaming, mobility and traffic separation and demonstrate the potential of our approach.
1 Introduction Industry is continuously looking for ways to further automate processes, improve efficiency, reduce energy consumption, increase economic benefits etc. This ongoing evolution is often referred to as Industry 4.0 [1], where everything becomes connected to a network (e.g., the Internet or a private factory network) by means of communication infrastructure. This not only involves field devices or machines, but also involves mobile robots such as Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) [2]. Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) facilitate transporting various types of goods automatically and handling materials in automated manufacturing systems. The earliest AGVs were essentially line following mobile robots, but more recent solutions consist of autonomously guided robots that act based on information about where they are and which destinations to reach. A key technology enabling such autonomously operating robot systems is wireless communication. Wireless communication between robots or between robots and a controller system is crucial for their operation, but challenging at the same time. As robots may move around quite fast through the network area, communication paths may change frequently. On top of this, some of the communication pertains to the real-time coordination of robots and requires sufficiently low latency. Further, radio wave propagation in industrial environments is generally vulnerable and may result in
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 N. Mitton et al. (Eds.): ADHOC-NOW 2016, LNCS 9724, pp. 325–338, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-40509-4_23
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communication in industrial environments is challenging and may result in network coverage problems or packet loss. Within this challenging context, robust and reliable wireless communication must be realized. In practice, such robots are very often foreseen to become part of the enterprise wireless network, a network consisting of multiple access points that aims to provide coverage on the entire production or warehouse floor. In this paper, we discuss the potential problems that might arise in such a wireless setting, taking the requirements from a real-life use case. We motivate the potential benefit of adding mesh capabilities to the mobile robots. The resulting mixed architecture aims to provide maximal flexibility and c
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