Robot-assisted energy-efficient data collection from high-fidelity sensor networks

As sensor technology advances, the availability of high resolution data and complex sensor readings become more commonplace, and the range of potential sensor network applications, accuracy, and data collection efforts expands. As a result, there is an increased need for tiered sensor network architectures and energy efficient data collection mechanisms in order to maintain network feasibility and operation. We propose a two-tiered multi-hop hybrid WSN architecture, where static wireless sensors collect high-fidelity data and robots act as mobile data collectors traversing the field. This architecture elongates the lifetime of the network by reducing the largest energy consumer, wireless communications. We present a feasibility study of the use of mobile robots for retrieval of high resolution data from within an event-driven tiered sensor network architecture. We also illustrate the trade-off between event density and network lifetime. Finally, we show that by using robots for data collection, the lifetime of the network can be extended by 2.3 times in average.