Abstract
It is well understood in the robotics research community that an autonomous mobile robot which is physically tethered to extend battery power limits, harness more powerful computational resources, allow convenient monitoring of sensor and process components or to increase the pay load is, at best, just a laboratory curio since the tether renders the vehicle more or less useless in many real working situations because of potential entanglement and actual range limitations.
This paper demonstrates that it is feasible and advantageous to build a mobile robot which can navigate competently in an initially unknown and time-varying obstacle cluttered environment with most of the above advantages of tethered operation but without a physical tether; instead, a virtual tether based on a radio ethernet bridge is used.
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© 1998 Springer-Verlag London Limited
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Jarvis, R. (1998). Etherbot — An autonomous mobile robot on a local area network radio tether. In: Casals, A., de Almeida, A.T. (eds) Experimental Robotics V. Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences, vol 232. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0112962
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0112962
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