Mobile sensor-actuator networks: opportunities and challenges

Large-scale networks of integrated wireless sensors and actuators are becoming increasingly tractable. Advances in hardware technology and engineering design have led to dramatic reductions in size, power consumption, and cost for digital circuitry, wireless communications, and MEMS. This enables very compact, autonomous, and mobile nodes, each containing one or more sensors and actuators, computation and communication capabilities, and a power supply. Networking is a crucial ingredient to harness these capabilities into a complete system. While wireless sensor networks have been studied for about a decade, their extension with actuators is a more recent thrust of research that greatly enhances their capabilities and range of applications, at the cost of requiring closed control loops that can cause instability and are subject to delay constraints. This article provides an overview of existing and emerging technologies, pointing out the opportunities and challenges of mobile integrated sensor-actuator networks and their relation to CNNs.