Barrier Coverage Between Two Landmarks

This chapter introduces the concept of barrier coverage and considers the problem of distributed barrier coverage between two landmarks or points. This barrier coverage problem is to deploy a group of autonomous mobile sensors to form a sensor barrier that detects any object trying to enter a protected region between two landmarks or points. The objective of this chapter is to develop a set of distributed motion coordination rules for a group of self-deployed mobile robotic sensors to achieve barrier coverage between two given landmarks. For instance, the landmarks can be given by two far-apart posts on a country's border, and the surveillance requirement is that any passing intruder has to be detected between the posts. A distributed self-deployment algorithm is proposed. This chapter also provides a mathematically rigorous proof of its convergence and verifies its performance by computer simulations.