Testbed Experiments of Dynamic Survivable Resource Pooling Using FPGA-Based Robot

Dynamic survivable resource pooling (DSRP) is a new mechanism to improve the survivability and reliability in distributed wireless mobile robotics systems. DSRP is based on a virtual backbone, which is a highly distributed, scalable, and survivable network, formed and maintained through one-hop beacons among mobile robots. We implement the DSRP mechanism in our FPGA-based distributed robotics testbed and demonstrate its effectiveness in a search-and-rescue scenario, where robots cooperate to provide the rescuer with a set of pictures to build a panoramic view of the disaster site. The current testbed implementation at the City College of the City University of New York includes a total of 22 nodes emulating real- life mobile robots, where 2 nodes are FPGA boards and the remaining ones are laptop and desktop PCs. The measurements collected from the testbed confirm that the DSRP framework significantly improve the system reliability and survivability.