A bio-inspired hierarchical mobile sensor network for fast deployment and displacement in human impassible environments

Beyond a traditional wireless sensor network, a mobile sensor network has several advantages when deployed in human impassable environments. The mobile nodes can move to search and gather environmental information while they automatically self-organize to form ad-hoc network for data transmission. However, it is more challenging to achieve such possibilities because of the demand of sensor deployment and displacement of self-organized networks. In this paper we present our approach to a bio-inspired hierarchical sensor network that can be fast deployed and displaced in human impassable environments. The hierarchical network consists of mothership and child sensor nodes in which the child sensor nodes are automatically deployed and replaced by the mothership which is remotely controlled by the human operator. We also investigate possibilities of self-organization of nonidentical mobile sensor platforms for data collection and transmission. With several real-world experiments, we have demonstrated the concept of fast deployment and displacement as well as self-organization of the hierarchical sensor network.