Title: Deployment algorithms and indoor experimental vehicles for studying mobile wireless sensor networks

Authors: Dan O. Popa, Muhammad F. Mysorewala, Frank L. Lewis

Addresses: Automation & Robotics Research Institute (ARRI), The University of Texas at Arlington, 7300 Jack Newell Blvd. S., Fort Worth, Texas 76118, USA. ' Automation & Robotics Research Institute (ARRI), The University of Texas at Arlington, 7300 Jack Newell Blvd. S., Fort Worth, Texas 76118, USA. ' Automation & Robotics Research Institute (ARRI), The University of Texas at Arlington, 7300 Jack Newell Blvd. S., Fort Worth, Texas 76118, USA

Abstract: Wireless communication has been traditionally used in robotics to transmit sensory and telemetry information between a robot and a base station. Because research in mobile robotics has typically focused on navigation, mapping and sensor fusion, network oriented problems such as communication bandwidth optimisation, coverage and fault tolerance are not usually considered in this context. The motivation behind this research is formulating and solving combined robot navigation issues (such as obstacle avoidance, environment mapping and coverage) with sensor network issues (such as congestion control, routing and node energy minimisation). In this paper we present several types of algorithms for Mobile Wireless Sensor Nodes (MWSN) as well as experimental results with a fleet of mobile robots and sensors in our lab. The algorithms include Adaptive Sampling (AS) for distributed field estimation, Potential Fields (PF) for communication bandwidth optimisation, and a Discrete Event Controller (DEC) for mission planning.

Keywords: mobile WSNs; wireless sensor networks; robotic deployment; adaptive sampling; discrete event controllers; wireless networks; potential fields; robot navigation; mobile robots.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2009.028023

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2009 Vol.6 No.1, pp.28 - 43

Published online: 29 Aug 2009 *

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