Energy- and Time-Aware Data Acquisition for Mobile Robots Using Mixed Cognition Particle Swarm Optimization

In mobile data acquisition, mobile robots usually face challenging tasks when collecting information in an undetermined environment with energy limitation and time-sensitive requirements. We formulate the task of data acquisition as a multiobjective optimization problem under energy and time constraints. In our investigation, three objectives for data acquisition are considered, including collecting the largest amount of information, moving along a path with the smallest probability of encountering obstacles, and traveling with shortest possible overall distance. To resolve the formulated problem which yields the best path for a mobile robot, we propose a mixed cognition particle swarm optimization (MCPSO) algorithm, which adopts the min-max normalization to calculate the fitness, and we transform the multiobjective optimization problem into a single-objective optimization problem by summation after normalization. The efficiency of the MCPSO algorithm is evaluated for mobile data acquisition in several well-known benchmarks by simulation. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed MCPSO algorithm can achieve higher accuracy and faster convergence compared with other particle swarm optimization algorithms.