Abstract
In the event of a disaster, first responders must rapidly gain situational awareness about the environment in order to plan effective response operations. Unmanned ground vehicles are well suited for this task but often require a strong communication link to a remote ground station to effectively relay information. When considering an obstacle-rich environment, non-line-of-sight conditions and naive navigation strategies can cause substantial degradations in radio link quality. Therefore, this paper incorporates an unmanned aerial vehicle as a radio repeating node and presents a path planning strategy to cooperatively navigate the vehicle team so that radio link health is maintained. This navigation technique is formulated as an A*-based search and this paper presents the formulation of this path planner as well as an investigation into strategies that provide computational efficiency to the search process. The path planner uses predictions of radio signal health at different vehicle configurations to effectively navigate the vehicles and simulations have shown that the path planner produces favorable results in comparison to several conceivable naive radio repeating variants. The results also show that the radio repeating path planner has outperformed the naive variants in both simulated environments and in field testing where a Yamaha RMAX unmanned helicopter and a ground vehicle were used as the vehicle team.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Hsieh M.A., Kumar V., Taylor, C.J.: Constructing radio signal strength maps with multiple robots. In: Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (2004)
Niessen, C.W.: Battlefield connectivity via airborne communications nodes. In: Proceedings of the SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering (1997)
Dixon, C., Frew, E., Argrow, B.: Radio leashing of an unmanned aircraft. In: Collection of Technical Papers - Infotech at Aerospace: Advancing Contemporary Aerospace Technologies and their Integration, vol. 2, pp. 1093–1102 (2005)
Dixon C., Frew, E.: Electronic leashing of an unmanned aircraft to a radio source. In: Proceedings of the 44th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, and the European Control Conference (2005)
Nguyen, H.G., et al.: Autonomous mobile communication relays. In: Proceedings of the SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering (2002)
Nguyen, H.G., et al.: Autonomous communication relays for tactical robots. In: Proceedings of ICAR 2003 - The 11th International Conference on Advanced Robotics (2003)
Nguyen, H.G., Farrington, N.,. Pezeshkian, N.: Maintaining communication link for tactical ground robots. In: Proceedings of AUVSI’s Unmanned Systems North America 2004, pp. 311–323 (2004)
Nguyen, H.G., et al.: Maintaining communication link for a robot operating in a hazardous environment. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Robotics and Remote Systems for Hazardous Environments, pp. 256–263 (2004)
Chaimowicz, L., et al.: Deploying air-ground multi-robot teams in urban environment. In: Parker, L., Schneider, F., Schultz, A. (eds.) Multi-Robot Systems- From Swarms to Intelligent Automata, vol. III, pp. 223–234. Springer Netherlands (2005)
Fink, J., Kumar, V.: Online methods for radio signal mapping with mobile robots. In: 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (2010)
Ayad, M., Nielson, P., Voyles, R.M.: RF mapping for intelligent repeater placement and signal recovery. In: Emergency Management and Robotics for Hazardous Environments (EPRRSD) (2011)
LaValle, S.M.: Planning Algorithms. Cambridge University Press (2006)
Ferguson, D., Likhachev, M., Stentz, A.: A guide to heuristic-based path planning. In: Proceedings of ICAPS Workshop on Planning under Uncertainty for Autonomous Systems (2005)
Hansen, E.A., Zhou, R.: Anytime heuristic search. J. Artif. Intell. Res 28, 267–297 (2007)
Likhachev, M., et al.: Anytime search in dynamic graphs. Artif. Intell. J. 172(14), 1613–1643 (2008)
Krawiec, B., et al.: Post detonation autonomous robotic response system. In: Emergency Management and Robotics for Hazardous Environments (EPRRSD) (2011)
Balanis, C.A.: Antenna Theory: Analysis and Design, 3rd edn. Wiley, Hoboken, NJ (2005)
Neskovic, A., Neskovic, N., Paunovic, G.: Modern approaches in modeling of mobile radio systems propagation environment. IEEE Commun. Surveys 3(3), 2–12 (2000)
Hata, M.: Empirical formula for propagation loss in land mobile radio services. IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol. VT-29(3), 317–325 (1980)
Okumura, Y., et al.: Field Strength and its variability in VHF and UHF land-mobile radio service. Rev Electr. Commun. Lab. (Tokyo) 16, 825–873 (1968)
Walfisch, J., Bertoni, H.L.: A theoretical model of UHF propagation in urban environments. IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation 36(12), 1788–1796 (1988)
Abhayawardhana, V.S., et al.: Comparison of empirical propagation path loss models for fixed wireless access systems. IEEE Veh. Technol. Conf. 61(1), 73–77 (2005)
Adawi, N.S., et al.: Coverage prediction for mobile radio systems operating in the 800–900 MHz frequency range. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology 37(1), 3–72 (1988)
Parsons, J.D.: The Mobile Radio Propagation Channel. Wiley, Chichester (2000)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Krawiec, B., Kochersberger, K. & Conner, D.C. Autonomous Aerial Radio Repeating Using an A*-Based Path Planning Approach. J Intell Robot Syst 74, 769–789 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-013-9853-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-013-9853-3