Mobile robots such as automated guided vehicles become increasingly important in industry as they can greatly increase efficiency. For their operation such robots must rely on wireless communication, typically realized by connecting them to an existing enterprise network. In this paper we motivate that such an approach is not always economically viable or might result in performance issues. Therefore we propose a flexible and configurable mixed architecture that leverages on mesh capabilities whenever appropriate. Through experiments on a wireless testbed for a variety of scenarios, we analyse the impact of roaming, mobility and traffic separation and demonstrate the potential of our approach.
['Elnaz Alizadeh Jarchlo', 'Jetmir Haxhibeqiri', 'Ingrid Moerman', 'Jeroen Hoebeke']
To Mesh or not to Mesh: Flexible Wireless Indoor Communication Among Mobile Robots in Industrial Environments