Energy-Aware UAV-Driven Data Collection With Priority in Robotic Wireless Sensor Network

The work tackles energy-aware data-gathering problems in clustered robotic networks. A cluster head (CH) robot assigns tasks to other robots which gathers monitoring data from sensors. After executing their assigned tasks, they send the resultant data to it in each cluster. Then, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with limited battery capacity collects data from CH robots by visiting a portion of them. Under the limit of battery capacity of UAV, we aim to collect data from CH robots with a minimum cost by visiting a subgroup of CH robots among them. UAV makes a decision on the CH robots to visit by also caring a set of CH robot in addition to its battery capacity and locations of all CH robots. If exists, a nonvisited CH robot sends data to other CH robots for forwarding data. The data forwarding strategy of each nonvisited CH robot is also considered for this cost optimization. Differently from traditional approaches, we consider fixed battery capacity for the UAV. The proposed algorithm is compared for various numbers of CH robots and priority sets by considering the energy consumption of CH robots, which has an influence on the lifetime of the network.