Back-Tracking Based Sensor Deployment by a Robot Team

Existing solutions to carrier-based sensor placement by a single robot, in a bounded unknown region of interest (ROI), do not guarantee full area coverage and/or do not terminate. We propose a novel localized algorithm, named Back-Tracking Deployment (BTD). To construct a full coverage solution over the ROI, mobile robots (carriers) carry static sensors as payload and drop them at visited empty vertices of a virtual square, triangular or hexagonal grid. A Single robot will move forward along the virtual grid in open directions with respect to a predefined order of preference until a dead end is reached. Then it back-tracks to the nearest sensor adjacent to an empty vertex on its backward path (it is an `entrance' to an unexplored/uncovered area). The robot resumes regular forward moving and sensor dropping from there. To save movement steps, the back tracking is performed along a locally identified shortcut. We extend the algorithm to support multiple robots that move independentl...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SECON
• Authors: Greg Fletcher, Xu Li, Amiya Nayak, Ivan Stojmenovic
• Keywords: Communications, Robot, SECON 2010, Sensor, Single Robot