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

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.