Path planning for sensor data collecting mobile robot

A mobile robot employed for data collection is faced with the problem of travelling from an initial location to a final location while maintaining as close a distance as possible to all the sensors at a given time in the journey. Here we employ optimal control ideas in forming the necessary control commands for such a robot resulting not only the necessary acceleration commands for the underlying robot, but also the resulting trajectory. This approach can also be easily extended for the case of producing the optimal trajectory for an ariel vehicle used for data collection from indiscriminately scattered ad-hoc sensors located on the ground. We demonstrate the implementation of our algorithm using a Pioneer 3-AT robot.