A particle filtering method for wireless sensor network localization with an aerial robot beacon

This paper presents a new method for the 3D localization of an outdoor wireless sensor network (WSN) by using a single flying beacon-node on-board an autonomous helicopter, which is aware of its position thanks to a GPS device. The technique is based on particle filtering and does not require any prior information about the position of the nodes to be estimated. Its structure and stochastic nature allows a distributed computation of the position of the nodes. The paper shows how the method is very suitable for outdoor applications with robotic data-mule systems. The paper includes a section with experiments.