Band-Separated Redundant Communication for a Mars-Analog Rover
Zamiul Rashid, Akid Anis, Tanzim Ahmed, Md. Golam Rabiul Alam, Md. Khalilur Rhaman
Teams in the University Rover Challenge (URC) drive their rovers remotely and often out of sight. The organizers name communication failure as the most common reason a team falls short. A rover therefore needs bandwidth for several camera views and a command path that survives the loss of one radio. We describe and field test the communication stack of the BRACU Mongol-Tori rover, which keeps vision and control on separate radios and bands. Video and RTK corrections travel over a 5.2 GHz bridge with a 2.4 GHz backup, and the Babel routing protocol chooses between them. Every command goes out on two sub-gigahertz radios at once, and the rover uses the backup copy only when the primary falls silent. We tested the backhaul on the bench with a power cut and injected packet loss. We also drove the rover more than a kilometer from the base, and line of sight ended about halfway. On the bench, traffic reached the backup within a few seconds. A metric offset kept it on a primary that lost one packet in ten. In the field, the primary failed at 771 m and the backup carried video and corrections to just over a kilometer. The drive also exposed a limit of Babel, which judges a link only by lost Hello messages. It kept traffic on a primary with a faulty receiver, although the backup reported twice the capacity, and it flapped at the edge of range. We close with lessons on antenna aiming, link metrics and logging.
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