Measurement of dynamic sampling period of multi mobile robots system with wireless communication

Until now, we have established the multi mobile robot system based on the wireless communication and subsumption architecture. In this system, a command is decided in the supervisory server based on subsumption architecture. The server transmits a command packet to each mobile robot by wireless communication. Each mobile robot moves based on the command while transmitting a response packet including sensor information to the server. The sensor information is used as the inputs for agents in the subsumption architecture. The communication time is important factor in this system because it influences the control period directly. The communication speed of multiple mobile robots is not so fast, because this system is designed based on miming a simple insect, so that the robots are composed of low cost components. Measuring the communication time is required to realize a suitable control system. The communication time is variable so we define the dynamic sampling period as the communication time between a PC server and each robot. In this paper, dynamic sampling period of multi mobile robot system is measured with the resolution of the 2 ms using multi media timer on Windows system. Furthermore, the success rate of communication is also measured, which is defined as the reception number of times divided by the transmission number of times. The results help us to design the control system based on subsumption architecture, such as layering agents, adding other agents and improving agent's behavior.