Society of Robots - Robot Forum
General Misc => Misc => Topic started by: ModMob on June 01, 2011, 04:31:54 PM
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I'm designing a multi-robot system that I'll contol remotely (semi-autonomous). I will need to perform offline calculations on my PC, to ease the load on my MCU. The focus of my project isn't wireless networking and time is limited. Most ready-to-use hardware seems to be intended to master/slave communication - no real mention of how to set up a larger piconet for multiple robots.
Could anyone tell me of a cost effective, ready-to-use Bluetooth system that I can use in my robot system? Does anyone have experince controlling multiple robots via bluetooth?
I'm looking for practical tips, so I can hit the ground running with my areas of research, once we build the prototype.
Cheers,
Mod
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Bluetooth usually takes the form of serial connections, and you need a bluetooth serial adapter on both ends to do two-way information transfer(e.g. laptop to BT serial adapter is 1-way, as I recently discovered). I've not heard of bluetooth being used for a 'swarm' of bots. It's probably doable, but not without a lot of work.
The more likely solution will be the xbee/zigbee products, I think. This is lower power and cheaper, and in fact more reliable. I know I saw something for bot-to-bot communication recently, but don't recall. Others will know more and I'm sure they'll pipe up. Hope that helps :)
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Great advice.....for some reason I stopped looking at Xbee stuff. I'll dig a bit more into this. From a quick search it seemed that BT stuff is used in ad-hoc robot network research...probably due to the higher data rate (cooperative mapping, SLAM etc.)
For what I'm doing I think you're entirely right (based on a quick search) - Xbee is the way to go.
Thanks,
Mod