Distributed Coverage Control with Sensory Feedback for Networked Robots

Abstract

This paper presents a control strategy that allows a group of mobile robots to position themselves to optimize the measurement of sensory information in the environment.The robots use sensed information to estimate a function indicating the relative importance of different areas in the environment.Their estimate is then used to drive the network to a desirable placement configuration using a computationally simple decentralized control law.We formulate the problem, provide a practical control solution, and present the results of numerical simulations.We then discuss experiments carried out on a swarm of mobile robots.