A network architecture for large mobile robotics environments

Mobile robotics environments must adopt networking solutions that provide secure and reliable communications for the mobile robots across wide areas such as hospitals, factories, farms, etc. This paper proposes a network architecture for large mobile robotic environments built above the existing networking infrastructures. The architecture builds an overlay network above the already deployed network. The overlay network must fulfill the requirements demanded by mobile robotic applications, mainly, communication continuity during handover, security, and quality of service. A prototype of this architecture was implemented and evaluated in a mobile robotic environment composed of Pioneer P3-DX mobile robots accessed through the Internet. Results from simulation show that the architecture scales well in larger networking scenarios.