Energy efficient deployment of Wireless Sensor Network by multiple mobile robots

Disaster management is one of the most critical applications that can be performed by a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). The optimized deployment of sensor nodes is required for the successful relay of information. This paper proposes the deployment of sensor nodes by multiple autonomous mobile robots in an unexplored large disaster prone territory. The use of multiple robots provides important advantages over human-assisted placement like safety, accurate positioning and flexibility. For accurate location of an event, localization of the sensor nodes is very important which is achieved by using Received Signal Strength (RSS) from anchor nodes and the sensor nodes which act as anchor node after being placed. Placement of node by robots helps in achieving the location information of all the nodes that makes up the network. Communication and coordination between the multiple robots over the sensor nodes is used to achieve accurate localization, faster exploration and network creation. In this study, energy efficient utilization of the sensor node is achieved when it acts as an anchor node as it only responds when it receives the node discover command which a property of Zigbee protocol from the robot placing the sensor nodes. Hardware simulation of the proposed scheme is carried out by using Firebird V robots and Zigbee protocol is used for communication and coordination between the robots.