Developing Active Sensor Networks with Micro Mobile Robots

In this paper a new sensor network architecture called active sensor network (ASN) is developed. By integrating multiple small, sensor network-friendly mobile robots into a traditional sensor network, a closed-loop, dynamic, adaptive sensor network is formed. Such sensor networks have the following merits: adaptivity, self healing, responsiveness and longer lifetime. This paper focuses on the distributed sensor node localization and service set partition among multiple micro mobile robots. For node localization, a potential-based robot area partition algorithm and a distributed localization algorithm are developed. For service set partition, a load-balanced partitioning algorithm is developed. Simulation results verify the proposed algorithms