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