Integrated Mobile and Static Sensing for Target Tracking

Networks of low-power, low-cost, and widely distributed wireless sensor nodes are being envisioned and developed for many military applications including surveillance and localization. However, due to energy and communication constraints, combinations of static nodes (such as unattended ground sensors (UGS)) and mobile nodes (such as robotic ground vehicles (RGV) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)) are being used to expand or fill in coverage areas and reduce energy costs. A multi-chaser target tracking scenario is developed where mobile nodes, or chasers, use information provided by static nodes to infer the position of an intruder in the sensor grid. In large-scale sensor networks with mobile access, the communication range of static nodes may be limited by terrain and signal transmission energy. A drop-box static sensor architecture is developed to aid data propagation in such limited range networks. Chasers will "drop off" previously collected information about the target and retrieve new information stored in the static sensors. An algorithm is presented which takes advantage of this particular architecture. It is used to demonstrate that the drop-box nature of the static nodes improves performance.