Robomote: Enabling Mobility In Sensor Networks KARTHIK DANTU MOHAMMAD RAHIMI HARDIK SHAH SANDEEP BABEL AMIT DHARIWAL and GAURAV SUKHATME Dept of Computer Science University of Southern California Severe energy limitations, and a paucity of computation pose a set of difficult design challenges for sensor networks. Recent progress in two seemingly disparate research areas namely distributed robotics and low power embedded systems has led to the creation of mobile sensor networks. We conjecture that augmenting static sensor networks with mobile nodes addresses many design challenges that exist in static sensor networks. We present here the Robomote, a robot platform that constitutes a single node in a mobile sensor network. We conclude by listing some of the research challenges that exist in enabling large networks of such mobile sensors in reality. These include rethinking some of the decisions taken in static sensor networks and some that are new to mobile sensor networks. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.4.0 [Information Systems Applications]: General General Terms: Sensor networks, mobile sensor networks, actuation Additional Key Words and Phrases: Robomote, mobile sensor network, sensor networks, actua- tion, actuated sensor networks, controlled mobility, mobility, robotics 1. INTRODUCTION Sensor networks are envisioned to revolutionize our daily life by ubiquitously mon- itoring our environment and/or adjusting it to suit our needs. The benefits of this technology has been elaborated at length in literature [Kahn et al. 1999; Estrin et al. 2000; Pottie and Kaiser 2000]. Here we will take a quick look at the main challenges to be overcome in enabling such technologies: Authors’ address: Dept of Computer Science, University of Southern California, 741 W 37th Place, Los Angeles, CA 90089. Contact email: dantu@usc.edu Permission to make digital/hard copy of all or part of this material without fee for personal or classroom use provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the ACM copyright/server notice, the title of the publication, and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. c  2004 ACM 0000-0000/2004/0000-0001 $5.00 ACM Journal Name, Vol. 1, No. 1, 12 2004, Pages 1–0??.