Distributed Robot-assisted Node Localization in Active Sensor Networks

In this paper we proposed a new sensor network architecture called active sensor network (ASN) where multiple small, sensor network-friendly mobile robots are integrated into a traditional sensor network. Such sensor networks have the following merits: adaptivity, self healing, responsiveness and longer lifetime. The focus of this paper is to develop a distributed sensor node localization with the help of multiple mobile robots. A potential-based robot area partition algorithm and a localization algorithm are developed. We verified our proposed algorithms in simulation