Developing active sensor networks with micro mobile robots

A new sensor network architecture called active sensor net-work (ASN) is proposed in this paper. By integrating multi-ple small, sensor network-friendly mobile robots into a tradi-tional sensor network, a closed-loop, dynamic, adaptive sen-sor network is formed. Such sensor networks have the fol-lowing merits: adaptivity, self healing, responsiveness and longer lifetime. This paper focuses on the distributed sensor node localization using multiple mobile robots. A potential-based robot area partition algorithm and a localization algo-rithm are developed. Simulation results verify the proposed algorithms