When Wireless Sensor Networks Meet Robots

Enabling integrated robots and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications is an important and extended challenge for both robotics and WSN research & development and a key enabler for a range of advanced hybrid applications, such as environmental monitoring and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). This paper describes a work-in-progress WSN/robots communication framework that is being purposefully built to facilitate the constructions of robotic ecologies, i.e. networks of heterogeneous computational nodes interfaced with sensors, effectors and mobile robot devices. This paper discusses a number of requirements characterizing this type of systems and illustrates how they are being addressed in the design of the new communication framework.