Data gathering tours for mobile robots

— We study a path planning problem which arises when multiple robots are used to gather data from stationary devices with wireless communication capabilities. Each device has a given communication range, and stores a fixed amount of data. The objective of the robots is to gather the data from these devices and to upload it to a base-station/gateway. We introduce a new optimization problem called the Data Gathering Problem (DGP). In DGP, the objective is to compute a tour for each robot in such a way that minimizes the time to collect data from all devices. In order to download the data from a device, a robot must visit a point within the communication range of the device. Then, it spends a fixed amount of time to download the data. Thus, the time to complete a tour depends on not only the travel time but also the time to download the data, and the number of devices visited along the tour. First, we study a special case of DGP where the robots’ motion is restricted to a curve whic...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IROS
• Authors: Deepak Bhadauria, Volkan Isler
• Keywords: Communication Range, Data Gathering, IROS 2009, Robot, Robotics