Wireless Video Sensor Networks over Bluetooth for a Team of Urban Search and Rescue Robots

In this paper, we describe a novel routing mechanism to create a low power, high-bandwidth Wireless Video Sensor Network (WVSN) for miniature distributed robots in urban search and rescue (USAR) applications. WVSN features: 1) high-bandwidth, highquality lossless images, 2) low power, and 3) low latency of data traffic. Traditional proactive network routing schemes exhibit low latency but are impractical for mobile ad hoc networks due to their high control overhead. Reactive network routing schemes are gaining popularity in mobile ad hoc networks, but suffer from high latency when a critical node disappears from the network and are, thus, not desirable for real-time imagery. Our proposed scheme exploits a hybrid ad hoc routing method on top of the low power Bluetooth communication protocol that not only reduces the latency, but also achieves a short routing path. We take advantage of the hybrid combination of proactive and reactive routing schemes to recover a change in the network. We not only simulate a hybrid routing scheme for WVSN, but also implement the proposed scheme on a small team of resource-constrained USAR robots, called TerminatorBot. Keywords-Ad-hoc network, Routing, urban search and rescue, wireless video sensor network