Sensors Expo & Conference 2019

Microrobotic systems could have a wide range of applications such as search and rescue, agricultural management, and subterranean exploration. Emerging microrobotic systems, such as insect-sized hexapods and postage-stamp-sized ionocrafts will have strict computational limitations imposed by size, power, and weight constraints. These limitations include significantly reduced wireless communication range and limited image processing power. As a result of these limitations, conventional communication and localization methods aren’t well-suited for multi-agent microrobotic systems. Low power wireless sensor networks are a potentially suitable framework for communication due to their very low power consumption, low computational overhead, and support for multi-hop relayed communication. With its modest computational requirements, lighthouse localization could be a viable method of localization for resource-constrained systems. This session discusses the challenges facing localization and communication in microrobotic systems, and distributed localization in robotic wireless sensor networks using lighthouse technology.