1 Chapter 9 Coordination in Sensor, Actuator and Robot Networks

This chapter surveys the existing representative work in both sensor-actuator and actuator-actuator coordination. Sensor-actuator coordination deals with establishing data paths between sensors and actuators, and can be used for sensor deployment. Actuator-actuator coordination includes robot coordination for sensor placement, dynamic task allocation, selecting best robot to respond to reported event, robot dispersion, boundary coverage, and fault tolerant response. In coordinated actuator movement problem, actuators are moved to desired locations to save energy in long-term communication tasks where the traffic is sufficiently regular and large in volume to warrant nodes expending energy for moving. A recent study on coordination among flying robots is introduced in the end. 9.1. Sensor-actuator coordination The collaborative operation of sensors enables the distributed sensing of a physical phenomenon. In WSNs (wireless sensor networks), the sink (base station) performs the functions of data collection, processing and coordination. In WSANs (wireless sensor an