Robotic deployment for environmental sampling applications

The use of robotics in environmental monitoring applications requires distributed sensor systems optimized for effective estimation of relevant models subject to energy and environmental constraints. The sensor carrying robots are in fact agents that facilitate the repositioning of network nodes in order to increase their coverage and accuracy. Wireless or acoustic network communication is an essential technology in transmitting the sensed as well as telemetry information between robots. Each mobile sensing node (robot) is characterized by sensing or measurement noise, localization uncertainty, and navigates in a region with a parameterized field model. This paper addresses a problem of great importance to the SN robotic deployment: adaptive sampling by selection and repositioning of mobile sensing nodes in order to optimally estimate the parameters of distributed variable field models. We present simulation results using deployment scenarios that will be experimentally validated at a future date.