Optimal mobile sensor motion planning under non-holonomic constraints for parameter estimation of distributed systems

Abstract

This paper presents a numerical solution for a mobile sensor motion trajectory scheduling problem under non-holonomic constraints of a project named Mobile Actuator-Sensor network (MAS-net). The motivation of the MAS-net project, at the first stage, is to estimate diffusion system parameters by networked mobile sensors. Each sensor is mounted on a differentially driven mobile robot to observe the diffusing fog. In other words, this project requires the observation of a parabolic Distributed Parameter System (DPS) by non-holonomic networked mobile sensors. This paper reformulates this problem in the framework of optimal control and proposes a procedure to obtain a numerical solution by using RIOTS and Matlab PDE Toolbox. The objective function of this method is designed to minimise the effect of the sensing noise. Extensive simulation results are presented for illustration.