My team and I are working on using the TriTrack in combination with the National Instruments DaNI (running Labview) to create a semi-autonomous system to be used for the disposal of hypothetical bombs. I should stress that this is not a real military project, merely an imaginary brief to allow us a final goal to work towards.
We already have the basic idea of what we are going to use each of the robots for - the TT is going to be used as the primary manipulator, largely manually controlled but able to follow a marked path provided by a sampled set of data from the DaNI. Currently this is going to be in the form of a series of points measured with a laser rangefinder, and then assembled into a 3d net map of the area we are navigating.
However, none of us have any particular experience with networking robots to basestations. The TT will need to be able to communicate mission time, robot status, payload status etc. to the PC basestation, and in turn will need to be able to recieve distance data from the DaNI, either via this basestation or directly between the two robots. I was wondering if anyone had any previous experience with this kind of project who would be willing to give us a prod in the right direction?
I realise that the brief above is fairly vague but I will reply with answers to more detailed questions should they be required.
I have not done anything quite like this, but have played around with robots communicating with remote controls and to PC… Not knowing a lot of details here, like distance the communications have to span or how much data… Here are a few thoughts.
a) XBee - Many different flavors (Type 1, Type 2, …) Easy to work with. I have mostly worked with Type 1. To work with multiple nodes, I use packet mode. With each packet you send out, you specify the address who you wish to send to. When your receive a packet, it contains the address who sent it… So you can build up whatever form of communications you wish. Also does not require any other special hardware (like wifi router). This is great for simple things like, Go here, Some status changed… However it is not have a high enough throughput to do things like, send live camera feeds over.
b) Wifi - Each node have a wifi adapter on them. You then use which ever communications you wish to use like TCP/UDP… to talk between the nodes. This is more complicated, probably requires a Wifi router. You did not specify what type of processors on each node, but wifi receivers on low end Arduinos, take up a lot of resources of the low end processors. They do work great with other processors like small linux boards like Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black,… As well with PC including SOC boards.
c) Bluetooth ? - I have not done much with these, but maybe could register both robots with main processor?
d) Many others. If you look at places like Sparkfun, you will see other options like 900mhz…
