Coverage control for mobile sensing networks

Jorge Cortés, Sonia Martínez, Timur Karatas, Francesco Bullo

Abstract: This paper presents control and coordination algorithms for groups of vehicles. The focus is on autonomous vehicle networks performing distributed sensing tasks, where each vehicle plays the role of a mobile tunable sensor. The paper proposes gradient descent algorithms for a class of utility functions which encode optimal coverage and sensing policies. The resulting closed-loop behavior is adaptive, distributed, asynchronous, and verifiably correct.