Decentralized control of mobile sensor networks for triangular blanket coverage

• Published in: Proceedings of the 2010 American Control Conference pp. 2903 - 2908
• Main Authors: Cheng, Teddy M, Savkin, Andrey V
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-06-2010
• Subjects: blanket coverage; Context; Decentralized control; Distributed control; Lattices; Mobile communication; Mobile robots; mobile sensor networks; Numerical simulation; Quality of service; Robot kinematics; Robot sensing systems; sensor deployment; Wireless sensor networks
• ISBN: 9781424474264; 1424474264
• ISSN: 0743-1619; 2378-5861
• DOI: 10.1109/ACC.2010.5531517

We study a problem of blanket coverage by employing a network of self-deployed, autonomous mobile sensors. The blanket coverage problem is to drive the mobile sensor network to form a sensor lattice that fully covers a region between two lines. In particular, the sensors form into the so-called triangular lattice pattern. A distributed motion coordination algorithm is proposed for the mobile sensors to address the coverage problem. The algorithm is developed based on some simple consensus algorithms that only rely on local information. To illustrate the proposed algorithm, numerical simulations are carried out for a number of scenarios.