Robotic Deployment in Wireless Sensor
Networks
Dr. Dan Popa
Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering Department
Tuesday, February 28th, 2006, 3:30-4:30pm
113 Jerry Junkins Building
Abstract
Wireless communication has been traditionally
used in robotics to transmit sensory and telemetry information between a robot
and a base station.
Because research in mobile robotics has
typically focused on navigation, mapping and sensor fusion, network oriented
problems such as communication bandwidth optimization, coverage and fault
tolerance are not usually considered in this context. Recently, due to a
dramatic reduction in the cost of wireless devices, on-board sensing and
computation, it is possible to envision deployment scenarios where large
numbers of inexpensive mobile robots are used as wireless sensor platforms. The
motivation behind this research is formulating and solving combined robot navigation
issues (such as obstacle avoidance, environment mapping and coverage) with
sensor network issues (such as congestion control, routing and node energy
minimization).
We present several types of algorithms for
mobile wireless sensor nodes (MWSN) as well as experimental results with a
fleet of mobile robots and sensors in our lab. The algorithms include adaptive
sampling (AS) for distributed field estimation, potential fields (PF) for
communication bandwidth optimization, and a discrete event controller (DEC) for
mission planning.
Biography:
Dan Popa received
his B.A. and M.S. degrees in 1993 and 1994, respectively, from