Link Quality Estimator for a Mobile Robot

Maintaining link connectivity between a mobile robot and its control station in a non-line-of-sight environment is challenging. One solution is to use intermediate relay radios that the robot can carry and deploy when and where needed to maintain the link. However, the precise placement locations for the relays are not known ahead of time. Therefore, the deployment decision must be formulated online and the relays deployed before the link with the control station breaks. A link-quality estimator is developed based on video throughput and received signal strength indicator data. The estimator takes into account human perception of video quality that is obtained via subjective testing by an operator. The data is used to train the link-quality estimator, which issues an alert that can be used as a trigger for an automatic relay deployment mechanism or to advise the operator to manually deploy relays before the link between the robot and control station fails.