Statistical Coverage Control of Mobile Sensor Networks

A fundamental challenge of mobile sensor networks is automated active reconfiguration of sensors in response to environmental stimuli in order to maximize their total sensing quality (or minimize their total sensing cost) of events occurring over an environment. In this paper, given an event distribution over a convex environment, we consider mobile isotropic sensors with adjustable sensing range and propose a new family of provably correct reactive coverage control algorithms for both continuous- and discrete-time sensor dynamics. The proposed coverage control algorithms constantly (re)configure sensor positions and sensing ranges in order to minimize a statistical distance, in particular, an
$f$
-divergence, between the event distribution over the environment and the overall event detection probability of sensors. We show that the standard Voronoi-based coverage control law of homogeneous mobile sensor networks is a special case of our framework where the event detection probability of each sensor has a Gaussian form, the statistical distance is set to be the Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence and sensor allocation is performed based on Voronoi diagrams. To increase the practicality of our framework, we also present its integration with a Voronoi-based collision avoidance strategy for disk-shaped sensor bodies and its extension to differential drive sensor dynamics, while retaining the stability properties.