Distributed simultaneous coverage and communication control by mobile sensor networks

The purpose of this paper is to propose a distributed control scheme to maximize area coverage by a mobile robot network while ensuring reliable communication between the members of the team. The information that is generated at the sensors depends on the sensing capabilities of the sensors as well as on the frequency at which events occur in their vicinity, captured by appropriate probability density functions. This information is then routed to a fixed set of access points via a multi-hop network whose links model the probability that information packets are correctly decoded at their intended destinations. The proposed distributed control scheme simultaneously optimizes coverage and routing of information by decoupling coverage and routing control. Specifically, optimization of the communication variables is performed periodically in the dual domain. Then, between communication rounds, the robots move according to the solution of a distributed sequential concave program that handles efficiently the introduced nonlinearities in the mobility space. Our method is illustrated in computer simulations.