UGV Clustering Radio Signal Propagation Analysis for Sustainable Rescue Operations using MATLAB

This paper presents the simulation of different cluster formation topologies of a 2.4Ghz radio frequency microchip for unmanned ground vehicles. The antenna toolbox of MATLAB was used to design the patch antenna which was loaded in a live editor used to simulate and measure the response of the radio signal strength on different network topologies such as bus, star and mesh. The model utilized five transceiver nodes with varying distances using various multipliers of the indicated maximum transmission range (tmax) capacity of the microchip. Simulation results indicate that in a setup with 5 nodes, the bus topology achieves the maximum transmission reach, allowing the nodes within the same cluster to receive signals from up to four times the tmax of a single transmitting node. In contrast, the mesh topology can only reach nodes within half of the tmax distance, whereas the star topology can cover nodes up to the initial maximum transmission range. The use of actual 2.4 GHz RF microchip on a designed mobile robot was tested and compared with the simulation of point-to-point transmission. The results showed that the percentage error between the simulation and actual testing decreases with an increasing distance values, ultimately achieving an error of 8.61% at 26 meters, which was the maximum distance at which the signal was successfully received.