Distributed Coverage Control and Data Collection with Mobile Sensor Networks

We study sensor network missions where mobile sensor nodes are deployed to detect events randomly occurring in a mission space and extract information from detected data sources. The control system for the mission is composed of three components executed in parallel on sensor nodes: coverage control, data source detection and data collection. In order to maximize the joint detection probability of random events, we employ a distributed gradient-based coverage control scheme we developed previously and improve it to allow limited sensing field-of-view constraints. To facilitate reliable data source detection, we adopt a common Bayesian occupancy grid mapping technique to recursively update the locations of potential data sources. Once a set of high occupancy probability locations are identified, the sensor nodes solve a dual-objective optimization problem incorporating both coverage control and data collection. The interactions among the three tasks are discussed. Simulation results are also presented.