Low-cost Bluetooth Communication for the Autonomous Mobile Minirobot Khepera

This paper presents a low-cost Bluetooth communication for autonomous mobile minirobots. The interfacing of the Bluetooth hardware is done by a simple UART connection, which makes the approach easily portable. Using ASCII commands and events, which are exchanged over this serial link, the Bluetooth operations can be controlled and monitored. Since internal Bluetooth stack operations are concealed, no deeper knowledge of the Bluetooth technology is necessary to utilize this wireless communication. These features make the presented approach perfectly suited for the integration into minirobots like the Khepera, where computational power and spatial resources are strictly limited.