Dynamic Medial Axis Based Motion Planning in Sensor Networks

An important property in sensor networks is the monitoring of temporal changes of hazardous situations such as forest fires. Rescue groups need to be aware of dynamic changes that affect their rescue efforts. In this paper, we discuss an infrastructure for sensor networks that provides a good abstraction of geometric and topological features of a dynamically changing sensing environment. This infrastructure enables efficient path planning and navigation using localized algorithms. We propose a dynamic medial axis infrastructure that represents shapes and changes of shapes in a geometric space. We develop distributed algorithms for maintaining this infrastructure as changes occur. Dynamic medial axis allows rescue teams to find a short path to safety in a changing environment. We show that our dynamic medial axis algorithms have low message complexities and provide good approximations to the true medial axis. Contact author. Hyunyoung Lee. E-mail: [email protected]. Address: 2360 S. Gaylord St, Dept of Computer Science, University of Denver, Denver, CO 80208. Phone: +1-303-871-7732, Fax: +1-303871-3010.