Design and Implementation of Mobile Robot for Nodes Replacement in Wireless Sensor Networks

Most wireless sensor networks consist of a large number of static, low-power, short-lived, and unreliable sensors. In this paper, we considered sensor networks consisting of both static and mobile nodes. Integrating both types of devices enables new applications, such as nodes replacement, hole and partition recovery, and autonomous deployment and redeployment. We designed a smart mobile robot and implemented an application of nodes replacement to demonstrate its use, via our nodes replacement algorithm. In this algorithm, the mobile robots can navigate towards low-energy sensor nodes and replace them automatically, with new sensor nodes, having no location information. The navigation algorithm is based on received signal strength between the mobile robot and the communicating node. The experimental results confirm that the mobile robots successfully achieved their assigned tasks.