Robot-Assisted Sensor Network Deployment and Data Collection

Wireless sensor networks have been widely used in many applications such as environment monitoring, surveillance systems and unmanned space explorations. However, poor deployment of sensor devices leads (1) bad network connectivity which makes data communication or data collection very hard; or (2) redundancy of coverage which wastes energy of sensors and causes redundant data in the network. Thus, in this paper, we propose using a mobile robot to assist the sensor deployment and data collection for unmanned explorations or monitoring. We assume that the robot can carry and deploy the sensor devices, and also have certain communication capacity to collect the data from the sensor devices. Given a set of interest points in an area, we study the following interesting problems: (1) how to decide minimum number of sensor devices to cover all the interest points; (2) how to schedule the robot to place these sensor devices in certain position so that the path of the robot is minimum; and (3) after the deployment of sensors, how to schedule the robot to visit and communicate with these sensor devices to collect data so that the path of the robot is minimum. We propose a complete set of heuristics for all these problems and verify the performances via simulation.