A reconfigurable mobile node for wireless sensor networks in unfriendly environments

This paper presents the design and implementation of a novel reconfigurable mobile node for wireless sensor networks. The proposed node is a palm-sized small robot which has two joints for crawling locomotion. It adopts the ZigBee protocol for wireless communication and control and therefore can be added to a ZigBee-based sensor network as a mobile node. Multiple modular nodes can make physical connections with each other by a docking mechanism to transform into various configurations. Therefore, they can adapt to changing terrain conditions in real-world applications. The basic locomotion performance of the implemented prototype has been verified in experiments.