Election-based sensor deployment and coverage maintenance by a team of robots

Abstract

Wireless sensor and robot networks (WSRNs) are an integration of wireless sensor network (WSNs) and multi-robot systems. They are comprised of networked sensor and mobile robots that communicate via wireless links to perform distributed sensing and actuation tasks in a region of interest (ROI). In addition to gathering and reporting data, sensors may also report failures of neighboring sensors or lack of coverage in certain neighbourhood to a nearby mobile robot. We propose a solution, called Election-Based Deployment (EBD), for simultaneous sensor deployment and coverage maintenance in multi-robot scenario in failure-prone environment. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first carrier-based localized algorithm that is able to achieve 100% coverage in a ROI of any shape with multiple robots in failure-prone environment since it combines both sensor deployment and coverage maintenance process. We can observe from the simulation results that EBD outperforms the existing algorithms while reducing the communication overhead to a great extent.