WiFi based communication and localization of an autonomous mobile robot for refinery inspection

Oil and gas refineries can be a dangerous environment for numerous reasons, including heat, toxic gasses, and unexpected catastrophic failures. In order to augment how human operators interact with this environment, a mobile robotic platform is developed. This paper focuses on the use of WiFi for communicating with and localizing the robot. More specifically, algorithms are developed and tested to minimize the total number of WiFi access points (APs) and their locations in any given environment while taking into consideration the throughput requirements and the need to ensure every location in the region can reach at least k APs. When multiple WiFi APs are close together, there is a potential for interference. A graph-coloring heuristic is used to determine AP channel allocation. In addition, WiFi fingerprinting based localization is developed. All the algorithms implemented are tested in real world scenarios with the robot developed and results are promising.