Robot Creates WiFi Network In Rugged, Inaccessible Terrains

A team of undergraduate students at Northeastern University in Boston are building a robot that can create a “theoretically” infinite WiFi network. And not just anywhere, it can go into the rugged terrains of battlefield or a disaster area and build the network there. The team had to deal with three main problems – the robot design, the WiFi network design, a way to control the bot. And the robot had to be able to travel over rough and rugged surfaces with ease. They came up with a 40 inches long, 26 inches wide robot that weighs 150 pounds and carry a load of 200 pounds. The GPS navigated bot can run for 12 hours on the lithium batteries it has and is equipped with pan-and-tilt webcam with night vision and a microphone.
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The WiFi system comprises of number of WiFi repeater boxes. There was a trade-off between performance and size and in order to get the best performance the boxes are a bit big. The repeater boxes use standard Linksys routers with open-source dd-wrt firmware and are also fitted with long-range antennas, amplifiers and lithium batteries. These boxes are enclosed in a weathertight, high-impact Pelican case which in turn is placed on the back of the bot and a solenoid latch system is used to deploy these boxes. What these boxes do is simple. When they are deployed at a place it finds the closest WiFi source and expands it into a bigger area. So, in theory, if you have enough repeaters, the network can be expanded to infinity.

Controlling the bot is the through web based interface. So we can use the very same network that the bot creates. Using this interface, we can control its camera, drop the repeaters at particular spots, access the GPS map of the bot, etc. See the video -



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