Routing in Mobile Robots

To bring an era of automation and robotics, communication between robots is an important aspect. As robots are mobile, topology of any robotic network is dynamic and the routing information needs to be updated with the change of positions of robots. The current system uses a publisher subscriber architecture using a central broker. All robots communicate via this central broker which poses a risk of single point failure, and that of a robot moving out of range from broker. Therefore, we need a distributed routing algorithm that can provide efficient communication between mobile robots. For this purpose, we studied and analyzed reactive routing algorithms like AODV and IEEE 802.11s that make a reverse path between two robots only when needed. The delay involved in them is a lot for our purpose. The next algorithm studied is Better Approach to Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (B.A.T.M.A.N.). This is an effective algorithm to provide communication between mobile robots as the routes are built depending on the number and freshness of Originator Messages (OGM) from each robot stating its existence. It does not involve any reverse path formations and OGM’s being very light messages, thus the algorithm is easy on the network. We simulated the algorithm and found preferable results depicting that B.A.T.M.A.N. can be efficiently used for routing between mobile robots.