The test bed is composed of multiple MWSN that enable sensing the environment at various locations. An inexpensive overhead camera serves as an indoor GPS offering infrequent location updates to the mobile sensors. These updates can be fused with the robot's internal location estimates computed via various Kalman filter formulations. A parametric colour field on the ground serves as the environmental field to be estimated. This could be either static as a printed colour field or dynamic as a time-varying field projected from an overhead projector. These dynamic fields could be used to simulate the spread of a forest fire, for instance. Finally, a base station serves as a centralized controller that communicates with all the sensors, captures field samples from various locations and builds an estimate of the field.The following sections provide additional details on the various components of the test bed.

Inspec keywords: wireless sensor networks; Kalman filters; mobile radio; Global Positioning System; mobile robots

Other keywords: time-varying field; mobile wireless sensor network; multiple MWSN; parametric colour field; printed colour field; indoor GPS; Kalman filter formulation; adaptive sampling

Subjects: Wireless sensor networks