Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge, and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control, learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity, localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature, and identify topics that require more research attention in the future

Device Free Localisation Techniques in Indoor Environments

The location estimation of a target for a long period was performed only by device based localisation technique which is difficult in applications where target especially human is non-cooperative. A target was detected by equipping a device using global positioning systems, radio frequency systems, ultrasonic frequency systems, etc. Device free localisation (DFL) is an upcoming technology in automated localisation in which target need not equip any device for identifying its position by the user. For achieving this objective, the wireless sensor network is a better choice due to its growing popularity. This paper describes the possible categorisation of recently developed DFL techniques using wireless sensor network. The scope of each category of techniques is analysed by comparing their potential benefits and drawbacks. Finally, future scope and research directions in this field are also summarised

Towards System Implementation and Data Analysis for Crowdsensing Based Outdoor RSS Maps

© 2013 IEEE. With the explosive usage of smart mobile devices, sustainable access to wireless networks (e.g., Wi-Fi) has become a pervasive demand. Most mobile users expect seamless network connection with low cost. Indeed, this can be achieved by using an accurate received signal strength (RSS) map of wireless access points. While existing methods are either costly or unscalable, the recently emerged mobile crowdsensing (MCS) paradigm is a promising technique for building RSS maps. MCS applications leverage pervasive mobile devices to collaboratively collect data. However, the heterogeneity of devices and the mobility of users could cause inherent noises and blank spots in collected data set. In this paper, we study how to: 1) tame the sensing noises from heterogenous mobile devices and 2) construct accurate and complete RSS maps with random mobility of crowdsensing participants. First, we build a mobile crowdsensing system called i Map to collect RSS measurements with heterogeneous mobile devices. Second, through observing experimental results, we build statistical models of sensing noises and derive different parameters for each kind of mobile device. Third, we present the signal transmission model with measurement error model, and we propose a novel signal recovery scheme to construct accurate and complete RSS maps. The evaluation results show that the proposed method can achieve 90% and 95% recovery rate in geographic coordinate system and polar coordinate system, respectively

Gossip Algorithms for Distributed Signal Processing

Gossip algorithms are attractive for in-network processing in sensor networks because they do not require any specialized routing, there is no bottleneck or single point of failure, and they are robust to unreliable wireless network conditions. Recently, there has been a surge of activity in the computer science, control, signal processing, and information theory communities, developing faster and more robust gossip algorithms and deriving theoretical performance guarantees. This article presents an overview of recent work in the area. We describe convergence rate results, which are related to the number of transmitted messages and thus the amount of energy consumed in the network for gossiping. We discuss issues related to gossiping over wireless links, including the effects of quantization and noise, and we illustrate the use of gossip algorithms for canonical signal processing tasks including distributed estimation, source localization, and compression.Comment: Submitted to Proceedings of the IEEE, 29 page