Micro Mobile Robots in Active Sensor Networks: Closing the Loop

A new sensor network architecture, active sensor network (ASN), is proposed in this paper. This architecture integrates multiple sensor network-friendly mobile robots into a traditional sensor network. Therefore a closed-loop, dynamic adaptive sensor network is formed, which has many desired merits. In this paper, the distributed sensor node localization and the service set partition among multiple micro mobile robots are studied. For the node localization, a potential-based robot area partition algorithm and a distributed localization algorithm are developed respectively. For service set partition, a load-balanced partitioning algorithm is developed, which adapts to the number of active nodes in the field. The proposed algorithms are verified through simulations