Multi-Layered Mobile Sensor Network With Robot Team

This paper presents a concept and its application of the dynamic multi-layered sensor network for gathering environment information. The architecture of the system is composed of sensor layer, physical layer, and communication layer. Sensor layer is the combination and the network of the sensor components in each sensor node. A sensor node has multiple numbers of sensors, and a number of robots for the mobile sensor network. Each mobile robot plays a role of mobile base for a sensor node, and consists of physical layer. We discuss the formation of the multi-layered sensor network, which is active, adaptive, and task oriented in the surrounding environment. As each sensor node consists of multiple numbers of heterogeneous sensors, sensor combination is not restricted to one particular objective or task. This fact allows the network to be multi-functional. Same kind of sensors can establish ad-hoc sensor network, while different kind of sensors fuse the data for improved interpretation of the environment. Experiments with mobile sensors nodes are conducted and illustrated to show the concept of the multi-layered mobile sensor network.