Coverage control for heterogeneous mobile sensor networks on a circle with guaranteed collision avoidance

This paper studies the coverage control problem for a mobile sensor network on a unit circle and the sensors have different maximum velocities. We model each sensor as a disk to approximately describe the actual size of sensors. The coverage goal is to minimize the largest arrival time from the mobile sensor network to any point on the circle and the sensors should avoid collision with each other throughout the coverage task. Then, a distributed control law with input constraint is developed to guarantee that the sensors can arrive to the optimal locations without collisions. Therefore, the coverage goal can achieve safely. Finally, a numerical simulation is presented to show the effectiveness of our distributed control law.