Sensor placement strategy and evaluation for underwater active electrosense arrays

Abstract

The active electrosense mechanism of weakly electric fish provides a novel approach for underwater robot localization and navigation. However, unsuitable sensor placement can easily lead to data redundancy or the loss of crucial information. Herein, we proposed a novel sensor placement strategy for localizing interested-region targets with active electrosense arrays. This paper formulates an optimization problem for sensor placement based on the array signal model and Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB). To solve such a nonlinear and nonconvex problem, an enhanced grey wolf optimizer (EGWO) with dynamic weight and segment search mechanisms is developed. Two indexes, relative Euclidean error and effective localization area, are introduced to evaluate the array performance. The results in both simulation and experiment demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed sensor placement strategy, as well as its superiority over uniform placement. The proposed sensor placement strategy can be used to design active electrosense systems on bionic robotic fish and other underwater vehicles.