Visibility-Based Coverage of Mobile Sensors in Non-convex Domains

Abstract

The area coverage problem of mobile sensor networks has attracted much attention recently, as mobile sensors find many important applications in remote and hostile environments. However, the deployment of mobile sensors in a non-convex domain is nontrivial due to the more general shape of the domain and the attenuation of sensing capabilities caused by the boundary walls or obstacles. We consider the problem of exploration and coverage by mobile sensors in an unknown non-convex domain. We propose the definition of ``visibility-based Voronoi diagram'' and extend the continuous-time Lloyd's method, which only works for convex domains, to deploy the mobile sensors in the unknown environments in a distributed manner. Our simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.