Data Collection for Robot Movement Mechanisms in Wireless Sensor and Robot Networks

A Wireless Sensor and Robot Network (WSRN) is composed of a set of sensors and robots. Compared with the traditional Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), the WSRN has added characteristics, such as the mobility of robots. The mobility of robots has been proven to be quite useful in prolonging the network lifetime of the monitoring environment. However, mobility is a major part of the energy consumption for robots. Thus, the mobility of robots requires intelligent control in order to efficiently complete appointed tasks. Compared with lightweight sensors, using robots to transmit heavy data (such as audio or video data) is more appropriate. Therefore, a communication path, which is composed of robots between the base station and the event point, should be maintained. In this paper, three movement schemes, called Greedy Back-up (GB), Stretched Back-up Path (SBP) and Back-up Path Regression (BPR) approaches, are proposed, aiming to construct the data delivery path while maximizing the network lifetime. Experimental results reveal that the proposed schemes achieve better performance than that of a related work in terms of network lifetime and average moving distance of robots.