Multi-Robot/PC Bluetooth Network

[ModMob]

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

[Gertlex]

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

[ModMob]

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