On the Cooperation between Mobile Robots and Wireless Sensor Networks

Employing cooperative heterogeneous systems can enrich application scenarios and achieve higher application performance. The combination of mobile robots and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a good example of such cooperation, and many recent research results have highlighted the benefits of the marriage of these two technologies. The main objectives of this chapter include: (1) providing a survey on a variety of applications with cooperating mobile robots and WSNs based on the roles they play for interaction, and (2) elaborating different cooperative interactions of robots and WSNs in our ongoing project, PLAtform for the deployment and operation of heterogeneous NETworked cooperating objects (PLANET), which is an integrated framework of heterogeneous cooperative objects for network deployment and operations