Signal strength differentiation based navigation of mobile robot in wireless sensor networks

This paper addresses the task of navigating a mobile robot through an open area assisted by a pre-deployed wireless sensor network that monitors the area. The locations of all the sensor nodes are unknown. From the robot's starting location to its destination, the robot will follow a sequence of sensor nodes. The sequence of sensor nodes is assumed to be known and will guide the robot to move from a sensor to another, until reach the destination. A novel navigation algorithm is developed, which does not use any GPS, range sensing device, nor any location estimation algorithm. The proposed algorithm utilizes augmented differentiation of received signal strength to guide the robot to move into the desired sensor node at each step. The advantage of this algorithm is that any range estimation or localization algorithm is not needed, thus, its computational cost is much lower. Simulation experiments are conducted to demonstrate the algorithm.