Coverage control for mobile sensor networks with limited communication ranges on a circle

The coverage control problem for mobile sensor networks with limited communication ranges is addressed in this paper. The goal of the problem is to minimize a coverage cost function which indicates the largest arrival time from the mobile sensor network to the points on a circle. Different input constraints are imposed on the sensors with first-order dynamics due to their different movement capabilities. To deal with this problem, low gain feedback is utilized to develop a distributed coverage control law for each sensor and an upper bound on the low gain is also provided. It is shown that networked mobile sensors can be driven to the configuration minimizing the coverage cost function as long as their communication ranges exceed a threshold and network connectivity of the sensors does not need to be preserved during the coverage task. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed coverage control law. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.