Wireless Communications for a Multiple Robot System.

A multi-disciplinary research project is being undertaken at NPS to develop a semi-autonomous robotic system to detect and clear land mines and Unexploded Ordnance UXO. The robotic system under development consists of a land vehicle, an aerial vehicle, and a ground-based control station. Reliable communication between these three stations is needed. A traditional wire-based network requires that the vehicles be tethered and severely limits the mobility of the vehicles. A wireless Local Area Network LAN is proposed to provide communications between the control station and the vehicles. The objective of this thesis is to develop the physical hardware and logical software architecture of a wireless LAN that accommodates the needs of the mineUXO project. Through an analysis of wireless modulation techniques, a market survey of wireless devices, and a field testing of wireless devices, a wireless LAN is designed to meet the technological, performance, regulation, interference, and mobility requirements of the mineUXO project. Finally, the wireless communication protocols and the development of an error-free application protocol specified by a FSM model and implemented in ANSI C code using Windows socket network programming completes the wireless LAN implementation.