Performance-guaranteed distributed coverage control for robotic visual sensor network with limited energy storage

A robotic sensor network is advantageous in performing a coverage task compared to the static sensor network due to its ability to self-deploy and self-reconfigure. However, due to the limited sensing range, when mobile sensors are initially deployed, sensors located far away from the area of interest may not be able to participate in the coverage task. Furthermore, since in reality the mobile sensors have only a limited energy storage, the movement of the sensors have to be as efficient as possible. In this paper, we consider a robotic sensor network with a limited anisotropic sensing range and energy storage. The sensing performance is assumed to be dependent on both the position and orientation of the target to the sensor and its range is reduced along with the movement of the mobile sensor. This paper proposes a new algorithm that guarantees the participation of all sensors in the network while at the same time maintains the energy utilization as optimum as possible. We combine the standard coverage algorithm with the leader-following algorithm where the standard coverage algorithm is further modified in order to take into account the energy consumption of the sensors. Simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.