Mobile Robot Performance Analysis

As stated in the introduction to the book, the CSN approach is based on the analysis of models of the sensor network, the physical phenomena, and the application scenario1. We apply this here to show that the exploitation of nonmobile, distributed sensor and communication devices by a team of mobile robots offers performance advantages in terms of speed, energy, robustness and communication requirements. At one extreme, mobile robots can be provided with a wealth of on-board sensing, communication and computational resources [8, 146]; at the other extreme, robots with fewer on-board resources can perform their tasks in the context of a large number of stationary devices distributed throughout the task environment [62]. In this study, all the models are simulated using software (C and Matlab), and the performance of robot tasks with and without the presence of an S-Net (i.e., a set of distributed sensor devices) is evaluated in terms of various measures.