Communication

The vehicle was equipped with a simple Arduino Mega microcontroller attached to an XBee radio and the GPS. The XBee hooked up to the vehicle was used in broadcast mode on a private network at a baud rate of 9600. Broadcast mode allows the vehicle to connect with any infrastructure that can receive its signal. The XBee radios on the infrastructures use the MAC address of the vehicle’s radio to send their information directly to the vehicle. The information communicated consists of only three small string messages: stop, go,<latitude,longitude>. Thus, this small bandwidth network was able to communicate with a small baud rate at a large range.