UAV-Driven Robust and Energy-Aware Data Collection in Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

Optimising data collection while considering energy consumption is vital for robotic and wireless sensor networks. Although static sink-aided cluster-based protocols provide energy-efficient possibilities, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided procedures are considered superior solutions for lowering energy consumption during data collection compared to static sinks. Several existing UAV-based systems have overlooked the practical constraint of the UAV's battery capacity. This study investigates the data collection process in robot network clusters by considering energy efficiency. Each cluster contains a cluster head (CH) robot that assigns collaborative tasks to each cluster member (CM) robot and collects data from the CMs. Simultaneously, a UAV gathers information from the CH robots by selectively visiting a constrained portion of them, due to its limited battery endurance. The decision-making process for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to visit specific CHs is constrained by numerous factors to improve the existing technology. These criteria encompass the remaining battery capacity of the UAV, together with the positions of all the CH robots. Unvisited CH robots employ CH robots as intermediate nodes to transmit data. The simulations illustrate that the proposed strategy effectively attains a total joint cost of zero, whereas the current state-of-the-art methods result in significantly higher total joint costs. Furthermore, the proposed policy achieves an efficient solution much faster than the conventional approaches.