Spatiotemporal Query Strategies for Navigation in Dynamic Sensor Network Environments

Autonomous mobile agent navigation is crucial to many mission-critical applications (e.g., search and rescue missions in a disaster area). In this paper, the authors present how sensor networks may assist Probabilistic Roadmap Methods (PRMs), a class of efficient navigation algorithms particularly suitable for dynamic environments. A key challenge of applying PRM algorithms in dynamic environment is that they require the spatiotemporal sensing of the environment to solve a given navigation problem. To facilitate navigation, they propose a set of query strategies that allow a mobile agent to periodically collect real-time information (e.g., re conditions) about the environment through a sensor network.