Performance evaluation of autonomous deployment of WSAN in a real environment
Gamal Sallam, Mohammad Al-Shaboti, Uthman A. Baroudi · 2017
Robots deployment is becoming so popular due to its applications in different aspects, especially in areas where human intervention is not possible or poses a high risk. Multi-robots deployment in an unknown environment is a new challenging problem that needs to be investigated to understand the behavior of robotics applications under real parameters. For instance, in industrial place robots can be sent to a building to detect a source of gas leakage or help to discover bodies under rubbles in case of damaged buildings. Virtual force has been proposed to tackle such a problem; however, most of the existing studies did not consider the physical properties of the robots and obstacles and their overall effect on the deployment purpose. In this paper, we will investigate two variants of the virtual force approach, full virtual force, and modified virtual force, taking into consideration all the physical aspects of Khepera III robot. The proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller has been utilized to control the robot movement towards the intended target when obstacles exist. The implementation has been carried out using a high fidelity simulator called Webots.