Improving 802.11p for Delivery of Safety-Critical Navigation Information in Robot-to-Robot Communication Networks

Real-world robot networks create hostile radio environments due to their highly dynamic communication topologies and stringent real-time transmission requirements. In this article, we propose improvements to contention-based networks that utilize inter-robot navigation information for safer robot motion control in dense multi-robot settings. Toward this end, we introduce a Crash Risk Prioritization (CRP) index, which is employed as the core metric in a scheme of dynamic beacon rate control. Key to our approach is a coupled evaluation setup that allows us to evaluate the impact of network-level changes on the safety of robot navigation. Our results demonstrate that the co-design and simulation of robotic control algorithms and network protocols provide key insights and metrics into the network-level requirements for V2V systems. These insights allow us to make informed conclusions about how such networks can be best served by emerging standards.