Motion planning for deployment and reconfiguration of active sensor networks

Generally self-organization of the active sensor networks is moving a collection of robots from an area to desired area. When the robots reach the designated area in a network with a topological structure different from the desired one, reconfiguration of the sensor network must be performed by changing the topological structure. During the reconfiguration process, we need to ensure that each robot maintains at least one wireless link to the network. By optimizing the preserved connectivity, a distributed motion planning method based on single-step location prediction and collective potential field is presented to deploy and reconfigure the network. Simulations with a group of more that 40 robots under two cases (with or without obstacles) testify that our algorithm is effective for large scale robot network, and has scalability.