Multi-Robot Following Navigation Method for Valid Communication Distance Extension of WPAN Based Remote Control

An increasing number of researches and developments for personal or professional service robots are attracting a lot of attention and interest industrially and academically during the past decade. Furthermore, the development of intelligent robots is intensively fostered as strategic industry. Until now, most of practical and commercial service robots are worked by remotely operated controller. The most important technical issue of remote control is a wireless communication, especially in the indoor and unstructured environments where communication infrastructures might be destroyed by various disasters. Therefore we propose a multi-robot following navigation method for securing the valid communication distance extension of the remote control based on WPAN(Wireless Personal Area Networks). The concept and implementation of following navigation are introduced and the performance verification is performed through real navigation experiments in real or test-bed environments.