Bluetooth Khepera robot control and communication

Abstract: This thesis aims to provide a solution for wireless control of, and communication with and among Khepera robots, making use of the Bluetooth wireless technology, to allow wireless control of multiple robots in real time. It is based on the foregoing work of other students who constructed a module for wireless control of Khepera robots over Bluetooth, but they were not able to control more than one physical robot at a time. Khepera robots, as well as many wireless solutions to control those, are closely investigated, and an introduction to Bluetooth is given. An implementation of a Bluetooth protocol stack, which was carried out in the context of this dissertation, and constitutes one of the main parts of this project, is described in detail. The performance of the work discussed throughout this dissertation is evaluated w.r.t. transmission times of data over the wireless link, and afterwards compared to other solutions for real-time control of Khepera robots, e.g. a solution to control a Khepera robot over a wireless radio link. Furthermore, previously simulated experiments with autonomous agents are carried out on physical robots, to test the quality of the wireless solution. It is shown that the solution presented here operates much more efficient than any other existing solution, thus provides a very useful aid for the research community that is experimenting with physical robots in general, and real Khepera robots in particular, in order to simplify research, and allows for a broader spectrum of experiments.