Information-Driven Adaptive Sampling Strategy for Mobile Robotic Wireless Sensor Network

This brief addresses the issue of monitoring physical spatial phenomena of interest using information collected by a resource-constrained network of mobile, wireless, and noisy sensors that can take discrete measurements as they navigate through the environment. We first propose an efficient novel optimality criterion for designing a sampling strategy to find the most informative locations in taking future observations to minimize the uncertainty at all unobserved locations of interest. This solution is proven to be within bounds. The computational complexity of this proposition is shown to be practically feasible. We then prove that under a certain condition of monotonicity property, the approximate entropy at resulting locations obtained by our proposed algorithm is within 1 - (1/e) of the optimum, which is then utilized as a stopping criterion for the sampling algorithm. The criterion enables the prediction results to be within user-defined accuracies by controlling the number of mobile sensors. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated using a prepublished data set.