Cooperative positioning/orientation control of mobile heterogeneous anisotropic sensor networks for area coverage

This article examines the coordination problem of the nodes' motion in a heterogeneous anisotropic mobile sensor network for area coverage purposes. The mobile agents are assumed to have non-uniform with varying scaling sensing ability around themselves. The nodes' sensor footprint is allowed to be any arbitrary compact planar set, while the coordination scheme accounts for rotation of the latter. The domain sensed by the swarm is partitioned via the proposed distributed scheme that differentiates for standard Voronoi-alike distance-based metrics. The distributed cooperative scheme developed manages to lead the group towards an area-optimal configuration via proper control of the movement and rotation of each sensing node. Numerical results are provided in order to indicate the efficiency of the proposed technique.