Coordination in Sensor, Actuator, and Robot Networks

This chapter surveys the existing representative work in both sensor-actuator and actuator-actuator coordination. Sensor-actuator coordination deals with establishing data paths between sensors and actuators, and can be used for sensor deployment. Actuator-actuator coordination includes robot coordination for sensor placement, dynamic task allocation, selecting best robot to respond to reported event, robot dispersion, boundary coverage, and fault-tolerant response. In the coordinated actuator movement problem, actuators are moved to desired locations to save energy in long-term communication tasks where the traffic is sufficiently regular and large in volume to warrant nodes expending energy for moving. A recent study on coordination among flying robots is introduced in the end.