Infrared communication link maintaining method for multiple mobile microrobots

The paper presents a method of infrared communication link maintaining for multiple mobile microrobots, so as to enlarge their whole inspection range. A carrier sense multiple access protocol of infrared communication is employed. A motion control model based on virtual spring-damper system is established to avoid communication network splitting by monitoring infrared link quantity information among nodes. To verify the method above, a case study on infrared communication maintenance between the task-executed mobile microrobot and the base station is presented, in which the task-executed mobile microrobot executes a task and a team of microrobots act as communication relay nodes. The relative experiments are performed, and the feasibility of the method is verified.