RecoNode: Towards an Autonomous Multi-Robot Team Agent for USAR

Urban search and rescue (USAR) robots can benefit from small size as it facilitates movement in cramped quarters. Yet, small size limits actuator power, sensor payloads, computational capacity and battery life. We are alleviating these issues by developing the hardware and software infrastructure for high performance, heterogeneous, dynamically-reconfigurable miniature USAR robots, as well as a host of other relevant applications. In this thesis, a generic modular embedded system architecture based on the RecoNode multiprocessor is proposed, which consists of a set of hardware and software modules that can be configured to construct various types of robot systems for dynamic and unforeseen changes in the USAR environment. The benefit of this Reconfigurable Node is that, at run-time, the system can react to unexpected changes in configuration, such as nodes exhausting their batteries or the failure of sensors. These modules include a high performance microprocessor supporting complete on board processing for autonomous control, a reconfigurable hardware component, and diverse sensor and actuator interfaces. The design of all the modules in the electrical subsystem allows for the replacement of the motion control and serial communication capabilities within a dedicated FPGA logic module, which helps gain system performance by releasing the CPU from these tasks. The selection of module components and real-time scheduler and operating system (OS) are described. The portable power supply solution is also designed and tested

Wireless Video Sensor Networks over Bluetooth for a Team of Urban Search and Rescue Robots

Abstract- In this paper, we describe a novel routing mechanism to create a low power, high-bandwidth Wireless Video Sensor Network (WVSN) for miniature distributed robots in urban search and rescue (USAR) applications. WVSN features: 1) high-bandwidth, highquality lossless images, 2) low power, and 3) low latency of data traffic. Traditional proactive network routing schemes exhibit low latency but are impractical for mobile ad hoc networks due to their high control overhead. Reactive network routing schemes are gaining popularity in mobile ad hoc networks, but suffer from high latency when a critical node disappears from the network and are, thus, not desirable for real-time imagery. Our proposed scheme exploits a hybrid ad hoc routing method on top of the low power Bluetooth communication protocol that not only reduces the latency, but also achieves a short routing path. We take advantage of the hybrid combination of proactive and reactive routing schemes to recover a change in the network. We not only simulate a hybrid routing scheme for WVSN, but also implement the proposed scheme on a small team of resource-constrained USAR robots, called TerminatorBot. Keywords-Ad-hoc network, Routing, urban search and rescue, wireless video sensor network 1