Optimal mobile sensor motion planning under nonholomonic constraints for parameter estimation of distributed systems

This paper presents a numerical solution for a mobile sensor motion trajectory scheduling problem under nonholomonic constraints of a project named MAS-net, which stands for Mobile Actuator-Sensor network. The motivation of the MAS-net project, at the first stage, is to estimate diffusion system parameters by networked mobile sensors. Each sensor is mounted on a differential-drive mobile robot to observe the diffusing fog. In other words, this project requires to observe a parabolic distributed parameter systems (DPS) by nonholonomic networked mobile sensors. This paper reformulates this problem in the framework of optimal control and proposes a procedure to obtain a numerical solution by using RIOTS [1] and Matlab PDE Toolbox [2]. The objective function of this method is designed to minimize the effect of the sensing noise. Extensive simulation results are presented for illustration.