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Reply To: Which radio link for a student search-and-rescue robot inside a rubble mock-up?

Not an engineer, but our hotel hosted a rescue robotics demo last spring and I spent the day asking their team exactly this. What they did, and why:

Video and driving went over a tether: a thin cable on a reel on the robot paying out as it drives. They said every radio they tried for video failed in their rubble tests, and a cable also means the robot never loses control when it turns a corner.

Telemetry and an emergency stop went over a separate sub-GHz radio (868 MHz in Europe) at a low data rate, so if the tether snapped the operator could still stop it and still see gas readings.

When they had to go wireless for video they dropped small relay nodes behind the robot as it went in, each one in sight of the last.

4G was useless underground for them. The base station laptop was the only thing that talked to the internet.

For your dashboard: the laptop forwards the telemetry over MQTT, the robot never talks to the cloud itself. If you do use LoRaWAN rather than point-to-point LoRa, Hermetry’s network server follows the gateway’s frequency plan, so EU868 gear in Ireland.

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