Heterogeneous mobile sensor net deployment using robot herding and line-of-sight formations

This paper presents an approach for deploying a team of mobile sensor nodes to form a sensor network in indoor environments. The challenge in this work is that the mobile sensor nodes have no ability for localization or obstacle avoidance. Thus, our approach entails the use of more capable “helper” robots that “herd” the mobile sensor nodes into their deployment positions. To extensively explore the issues of heterogeneity in multi-robot teams, we employ the use of two types of helper robots – one that acts as a leader and a second that: 1) acts as a follower and 2) autonomously teleoperates the mobile sensor nodes. Due to limited sensing capabilities, neither of these helper robots can herd the mobile sensor nodes alone; instead, our approach enables the team as a whole to successfully accomplish the sensor deployment task. Our approach involves the use of line-of-sight formation keeping, which enables the follower robot to use visual markers to move the group along the path executed by the leader robot. We present results of the implementation of this approach in simulation, as well as results to date in the implementation on physical robot systems. To our knowledge, this is the first implementation of robot herding using such highly heterogeneous robots, in which no single type of robot could accomplish the sensor network deployment task, even if multiple copies of that robot type were available.