Coverage control in unknown environments using neural networks

This paper proposes a distributed adaptive control algorithm for coverage control in unknown environments with networked mobile sensors. An online neural network weight tuning algorithm is used in order for the robots to estimate the sensory function of the environment, and the control law is derived according to the feedforward neural network estimation of the distribution density function of the environment. It is distributed in that it only takes advantage of local information of each robot. A Lyapunov function is introduced in order to show that the proposed control law causes the network to converge to a near-optimal sensing configuration. Due to neural network nonlinear approximation property, a major advantage of the proposed method is that in contrary to previous well known approaches for coverage, it is not restricted to a linear regression form. Finally the controller is demonstrated in numerical simulations. Simulation results have been shown that the proposed controller outperforms the previous adaptive approaches in the sense of performance and convergence rate.