Underwater Multirobot Cooperative Intervention MAC Protocol

6533b82cfe1ef96bd128ff19

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Underwater Multirobot Cooperative Intervention MAC Protocol

José V. Martí Pedro J. Sanz Diego Centelles Antonio Soriano

subject

wireless networks access protocols General Computer Science Computer science Underwater communications End-to-end delay Time division multiple access Throughput 02 engineering and technology telerobotics Telecomunicació 0203 mechanical engineering 0202 electrical engineering electronic engineering information engineering Wireless General Materials Science Jitter business.industry Network packet Wireless network ComputerSystemsOrganization_COMPUTER-COMMUNICATIONNETWORKS General Engineering 020302 automobile design & engineering 020206 networking & telecommunications Application layer underwater communications lcsh:Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering remotely operated vehicles business Communications protocol Robots Protocols de xarxes d'ordinadors lcsh:TK1-9971 Underwater acoustic communication Computer network Communication channel

description

This work introduces a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol designed to allow a group of underwater robots that share a wireless communication channel to effectively communicate with each other. The goal of the Underwater Multirobot Cooperative Intervention MAC (UMCI-MAC) protocol presented in this work is to minimize the end to end delay and the jitter. The access to the medium in UMCI-MAC follows a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) strategy which is arbitrated by a master, which also has the capability to prioritize the transmission of some nodes over the rest of the network. Two experiments have been carried out with a team of four Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) in order to compare this protocol with Aloha-CS and S-FAMA MAC protocols used in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSN). In the first experiment, the communications and the AUVs have been simulated using UWSim-NET. The objective of this experiment was to evaluate all three protocols in terms of delay, jitter, efficiency, collisions and throughput depending on the size of the data packet and the rate of packet delivery in the application layer for each robot. The results of this experiment proved that UMCI-MAC successfully avoids packet collisions and outperforms the other two protocols in terms of delay, jitter and efficiency. The second experiment consisted of a Hardware In The Loop (HIL) teleoperation of a team of four robots. One of the AUVs was a real BlueROV in a water tank, while the remaining AUVs and the communications were simulated with UWSim-NET. It demonstrates the impact of the MAC protocols in underwater acoustic links. Of the three MAC protocols evaluated in this work, UMCI-MAC was the only one which succeeded in the proposed teleoperation experiment. Thus demonstrating its suitability as a communications protocol in underwater cooperative robotics.

year	journal	country	edition	language
2020-03-26	IEEE Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2020.2983641