Robot-Assisted Sensor Relocation for Confident Information Coverage in Wireless Sensor and Robot Networks

With the rapid development and advances of microelectronics, wireless communication and mobile terminal technologies, wireless sensor and robot networks (WSRNs) have been widely applied in many industrial fields. However, in some hostile, dangerous, remote and unreachable environments of inconvenience for human beings, how to effectively and efficiently solve the problem of uneven distributed sensors, improve the network coverage through robot-assisted relocation is a hot issue in recent years. In this paper, we first formulate a TSP-based area coverage problem of robot-assisted sensor relocation (RASR) to achieve confident information coverage (CIC) through cooperative sensing among the neighboring sensors, which is called the RASR-CIC problem. Then, a Genetic-RASR-CIC algorithm and a Greedy-RASR-CIC algorithm are proposed to deal with the RASR-CIC problem to achieve confident information coverage. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms considerably outperform Random-RASR-CIC algorithm in terms of the trajectory length of robot and the network coverage ratio.