A Study Towards Reliability- and Delay-Critical Wireless Communication for RoboCup Robotic Soccer Application

RoboCup is an international competition for a team of multiple fast-moving robots under a dynamic environment to autonomously play soccer game against another team. Due to the nature of the competition, the requirements and constraints for the wireless communication are extremely tight. The challenge is that wireless communication is involved in the control loop and therefore the reliability and propagation delay are vital factors which directly affect the team performance. Beside, various interferences with known and unknown frequency / transmission power usually exist at the competition site, which are hazardous environment to achieve reliable and low latency performance for wireless communication. This paper investigates the performance strengths and weaknesses of wireless communication means e.g. RF, IEEE 802.11a/b, IEEE 802.15.4, DECT, Linx, etc, which are commonly used nowadays in different RoboCup teams and propose improvements towards reliable and delay-critical wireless communication.