Guaranteeing Communication for Robotic Intervention in Long Tunnel Scenarios

In tunnel-like environments such as road tunnels or mines, a team of networked mobile robots can provide surveillance, search and rescue, or monitoring services. However, these scenarios pose multiple challenges from the robotics and from the communication points of view. Structurally, tunnels are much more longer than they are wide, and in the communication context, the multipath propagation causes strong fading phenomena. While the former can be addressed implementing routing techniques that allow multi-hop communication, fadings are unavoidable and represent a serious issue. However, under certain transmitter-receiver configurations, these fadings are predictable and periodic. On this basis, in this work we present a set of solutions to improve the communications between a base station and a robot taking advantage of spatial diversity and link-quality-aware navigation. These proposals are tested by means of simulations and real-world experiments carried out in a long railway tunnel, involving mobile and fixed nodes towards an application for monitoring purposes.