Search Agents Assisted by Wireless Sensor Networks: Cooperation Algorithms and Performance

For any emergency, such as a toxic gas leakage, a timely response is essential to minimizing the damage it could cause. In this scenario, rather than endangering trained animal or human searchers, a localizing robot searcher can be deployed to find the original source of leakage. The deployed searcher can be a single mobile searcher, multiple cooperating mobile searchers, or a stationary Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) that localizes the source via distributed cooperation strategies. The use of multiple searchers can significantly improve the accuracy and efficiency of the search, but it is also more costly. In this paper, we study the effect of assisting a single mobile searcher with a WSN that is distributed around the environment. Utilizing the Infotaxis searching strategy, two algorithms are proposed to facilitate the cooperation between the searcher and the WSN nodes. The results show that even with only 16 WSN nodes in a 50x50 meter area, both models improve the success rate of the single searcher by over 65%, and are comparable to the performance of two searchers.