Challenges in realizing ad-hoc networks based on wireless LAN with mobile robots

Modern applications of mobile robot teams or robot teleoperation often demand wireless any-to-any communication in combination with highly dynamical network topologies to accomplish more and more complex tasks. Nowadays, often WLAN is used to provide wireless communication for prototype system, for research testbeds, and also for commercial and industrial applications. The application of WLAN ad-hoc networks for teams of mobile-robots and human offers a lot of potential to fulfill the demands of such systems for a flexible, dynamic and efficient communication network. On the other hands new challenges rise when using ad-hoc networks. This contribution gives an overview about scenarios where these ad-hoc networks are advantageous and why it is an promising approach. This overview includes the available and implemented technologies which can be applied and how this technologies can be analyzed and evaluated. For the special case of mobile robot teleoperation a brief presentation of the behavior of different ad-hoc routing protocols is given and important aspects are discussed exemplarily.