A Mission Management Framework for Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles

Accepted versio

Development of Communication Link Perception for Decision Making in Mobile Agents

Examination and comparison of Packet Error Rate (PER), Error Burstiness (EB), and Receive Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) as communication connectivity management metrics for multi-agent mobile robot networks are explored in this thesis. Assessment Accuracy (AA) and Time To Process (TTP) are used as parameters for the comparison of metrics given that mobile robots are required to make critical decisions rapidly. The initial investigations are done with a mobile unit making PER, EB, and RSSI measurements at an increasing distance from a base station. A relatively linear relationship between PER and EB was discovered with a R2 value of .967. Strong correlations between EB and PER were observed in areas between 0% and 50% PER. A communication aware algorithm was developed using both EB and PER to allow the mobile agent to assess the Link Quality (LQ) faster in scenarios of communication loss by scanning for error bursts