Unmanned aerial vehicle-aided wireless sensor network deployment system for post-disaster monitoring

Abstract

This paper presents design strategies of using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to deploy wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for post-disaster monitoring. Natural disasters are unforeseeable events which cannot be prevented. But some recovery procedures can be followed to minimize their effects. Post-disaster monitoring is important to estimate the effects of disasters, which in turn is used to determine recovery procedures to be followed. We propose an UAV-aided unattended WSN deployment system. The system is a post-disaster solution which can be used anywhere required. In this study, we mainly evaluate the efficiency of localization and navigation performance of the proposed system. Our simulation studies with an AirRobot quadrotor helicopter in Unified System for Automation and Robot Simulation (USARSim) simulation platform show that UAVs can be used to deploy WSNs after disasters to monitor environmental conditions. Future work includes implementing the system using a hexarotor helicopter. © 2012 Springer-Verlag. © 2012 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.