Abstract
This paper describes a new wireless packet transfer mechanism called MACS that supports open and distributed multi-robot environments. In point-to-point communication in such an environment, node name management, routing decision, and collision occurrence are serious problems. MACS provides a group communication facility where members of the group are selected dynamically and autonomously by user-defined conditions. It implies that the node name management or the routing problem does not occur. Furthermore, MACS avoids the occurrence of packet collision by introducing a new time-slot assignment mechanism called TDMA/TP (TDMA in Temporal and Partial area) . The paper also describes our implementation and performance evaluation of MACS on our autonomous mobile robots. The results suggest that MACS successfully performs conditioned multicast communication with dynamically selected members in a multi-robot environment.
