Integrated Development of Collaborative Mobile Robots and WSNs Supported by Cloud Service

Abstract

The integration of multiple mobile robots and WSNs in forming a collaborative system working in large operational environments has many benefits such as perception and coverage extension that facilitate wider exploration and surveillance area, efficiency in data routing, effective and reliable task environment management, etc. In this paper, a collaborative framework that integrates multiple mobile robots and WSNs, with cloud computing services is presented. The WSNs are comprised of zone sensor nodes (ZSNs) distributed at the zone level that collectively represents the operational task environment and a mobile robot assigned to each of these zones with the ability to navigate around the zone and equipped with mobile sensor node (MSN). Events detected by the ZSNs are routed through each zone's mobile robot to a base station (BS) while it navigates to the location of ZSN detecting the event using A* star path planning algorithm. At the BS, the events' data are visualized on graphic user interfaces and also uploaded to the ThingSpeak cloud platform for storage and analytics. The Simulation results show effective event detection, classification, visualization with the support of cloud analytics as a service.