Distributed Coverage Control with Sensory Feedback for Networked Robots

Abstract

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. I.