A Movement-Assisted Deployment of Collaborating Autonomous Sensors for Indoor and Outdoor Environment Monitoring

Using mobile robots or unmanned vehicles to assist optimal wireless sensors deployment in a working space can significantly enhance the capability to investigate unknown environments. This paper addresses the issues of the application of numerical optimization and computer simulation techniques to on-line calculation of a wireless sensor network topology for monitoring and tracking purposes. We focus on the design of a self-organizing and collaborative mobile network that enables a continuous data transmission to the data sink (base station) and automatically adapts its behavior to changes in the environment to achieve a common goal. The pre-defined and self-configuring approaches to the mobile-based deployment of sensors are compared and discussed. A family of novel algorithms for the optimal placement of mobile wireless devices for permanent monitoring of indoor and outdoor dynamic environments is described. They employ a network connectivity-maintaining mobility model utilizing the concept of the virtual potential function for calculating the motion trajectories of platforms carrying sensors. Their quality and utility have been justified through simulation experiments and are discussed in the final part of the paper.