Coverage control for heterogeneous mobile sensor networks with unidirectional locomotion on a circle

This paper addresses the coverage control problem for a network of heterogeneous mobile sensors which are constrained to move forward. The goal of the problem is to minimize a coverage cost function which is defined as the largest arrival time from the mobile sensor network to the points on a circle. Low gain feedback is applied to design a distributed control law for each sensor with first-order dynamics and the upper bound of the low gain is provided. It is proved that the sensors can be driven to the optimal configuration such that the coverage cost function is minimized. The sensors’ order is preserved during the coverage task. The effectiveness of the proposed control law is verified by simulations.