Project Proposal: Mobility, Navigation and Localization

We propose to study the symbiotic relationship between mobility, navigation, and localization in the context of wireless sensor networks and mobile objects. We observe that mobility can aid in network node localization and that once localized, the network nodes can localize and track a mobile object (robot) and guide its navigation. Our motivation, and the ultimate goal of this work, is to realize the following scenario. A set of sensor networks nodes are dropped onto a field at unknown locations. A friendly (or unfriendly) mobile object travels through the sensor network in a structured (or random) walk. The network nodes determine their own locations by estimating the range to this mobile object in a coordinated fashion and applying a transform to these range estimates to yield the node positions in some global coordinate frame. Once localized, the nodes may multilaterate the location of the mobile object and guide its motion to locations and events of interest within the sensor network.