Path Planning Algorithms for a Mobile Robot Collecting Data in a Wireless Sensor Network Deployed in a Region with Obstacles

We consider the path planning problem for a unicycle-like robot used to collect data in a known cluttered sensor field. We focus on several practical issues which have not been dealt with well in the existing approaches: smoothness, obstacle avoidance, and collision-free with sensor nodes. Two algorithms are proposed and the first is called Viable Path Planning (VPP) algorithm to carry out designing of a viable path for the data collection robot. Further, we consider the scenario where the sensor nodes have heavy data loads. In this situation, following VPP path is not guaranteed to collect all the buffered data from the sensor nodes. We extend VPP by accounting the data loads and propose a Load-aware Viable Path Planning (LVPP) algorithm. The performance of our algorithms are confirmed by extensive computer simulations and comparisons with existing work.