UAV Data Mule Vehicle Routing Problems In Sparse Sensor Networks

UAV Data Mule Vehicle Routing Problems In Sparse Sensor Networks by Jason Tony Isaacs Recent advances in technology have enabled the use of wireless sensor networks for environmental monitoring and surveillance. Wireless sensor networks are particularly beneficial for monitoring environments that are unsuitable for human presence, such as those arising in the monitoring of permafrost, volcanos, forest fires, and battlefields. Mobile agents called data mules can be used to enhance sensor networks by visiting individual sensors to collect measurements. In this thesis, the mobility of the data collector is exploited to mitigate energy depletion of the stationary nodes and allow for sparse deployments at the cost of additional data latency. This motivates us to seek efficient strategies for the mobile vehicle in order to alleviate this data latency. The policies developed here apply directly to an acoustic source localization problem in which the objective is to localize the source of a transient acoustic event using measurements from a group of unattended ground sensors. First we study the optimal sensor placement of acoustic time of arrival sensors for local-