RadioBOT: A spatial cognitive radio testbed

This paper introduces RadioBOT, a flexible system of mobile robots for acquisition of radio frequency data. The motivation for such a test system is described, namely the difficulty in acquiring real world data for the purpose of spatial cognitive radio (CR) research. Some current areas of CR research are presented for which RadioBOT can gather data. We then describe the hardware and software components of our system. As a demonstration of the system's capability, we present here the results of a spectrum mapping experiment. In this experiment, we uniformly sample average signal power in a laboratory hallway where an emitter is present. From this data, we form an interpolated spectrum map of the signal power as a function of space. Knowledge of the area's spectrum map is then used to optimize the relay channel communication rate between a transmitter and receiver, by optimally positioning the relay node.