📡 Mari: Scaling Beyond Bluetooth - From 10 to 100+ Nodes
Mari: Micro-Robot Access Radio Infrastructure
Scalability issues with a Bluetooth radio? Fixed.
A few months ago I posted about the issues we faced trying to truly scale Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for low-power mobile nodes.
Now, I bring a teaser video of the solution we are developing: the Micro-Robot Access Radio Infrastructure (Mari).
Watch the Demo
Thanks to the help of Yinghao Gao, we now have a super fun mobile testbed for testing and demonstrating Mari’s performance:
What is Mari?
Mari is a new link layer and infrastructure that supports up to 100 nodes connected to a single gateway. (And thousands of nodes if you keep adding more gateways!)
Of course, the only thing about BLE that still remains is the radio. All else is rebuilt from scratch to satisfy requirements such as:
- Responsiveness for interactive control
- Throughput for massive OTA updates
- Fast roaming across multiple gateways
- Plug-and-play scalability and extended range
The Vision
We are developing Mari as part of the OpenSwarm.eu project, and we envision it as an enabler platform for ultra-dense mobile IoT — such as robotic swarms.
This represents a fundamental shift from trying to make Bluetooth work at scale, to building a purpose-built solution that truly meets the demands of modern swarm robotics and dense IoT deployments.
Learn More
➡️ Check out our work:
