The advances in mobile robotics allow us today to add the mobility concept into many different classes of Wireless Sensor Networks. The deployment of mobile sensors is possible and useful in many application scenarios, ranging from the environmental monitoring and public safety applications, to the industry, healthcare and military applications. Two topics are elaborated in this thesis: networked robot middleware design and a set of approaches for mobile robot deployment in the context of wireless sensor networks. The middleware proposed and described in this thesis allows the user to easily implement different types of deployment algorithms for mobile robots. In the second part of the thesis, three main problems are presented and analyzed. The first is the problem of improving the quality of service with the use of mobile robotic networks, which is solved with the use of deployment algorithm that improves the performance of a multimedia communication by using an intrusive methods to gather the necessary transmission quality evaluation metrics. Second problem is the coverage of the point of interest with mobile robots, where the fixed base station is placed inside the field of interest, while the available mobile robots cover the point of interest and relay the information about it towards the base station in a multi-hop manner. The third problem is the point of interest discovery and coverage with the use of mobile robots which follow concentric circular paths to explore and cover the field of interest, and, by adjusting the movement velocity, they satisfy the constraints on point of interest coverage and connectivity with the base station.
Mobile wireless sensor network architecture: Applications to mobile sensor deployment