Title: Distributed exploratory coverage with limited mobility

Authors: Sriram Chellappan; M.E. Snyder; Mayur Thakur

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Missouri University of Science and Technology, 1870 Miner Circle, Rolla, MO 65409, USA ' Department of Computer Science, Missouri University of Science and Technology, 1870 Miner Circle, Rolla, MO 65409, USA ' Google, Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, California, USA

Abstract: The impact of limited mobility in mobile sensor platforms is a limiting factor in the effectiveness of coverage algorithms. As the usage of autonomous drones increases in applications ranging from search-and-rescue, detection of forest fires, and surveillance, the ability for these platforms to employ distributed algorithms is increasingly important. In this paper, we examine the problem of exploratory coverage, wherein the objective is to move a number of mobile sensors to fully explore (and hence, sense every point in) a target area in order to detect any critical event that has already occurred in the area. Further, we present a taxonomy of coverage problems as identified by the relationships between sensor range, coverage area, number of sensors, and mobility (range). We then design a purely localised and distributed approximation algorithm for our problem, and provide simulation results for sparse and balanced deployments to demonstrate the effects of limited mobility on exploratory coverage.

Keywords: mobile sensors; sensor networks; exploratory coverage; distributed algorithms; limited mobility; critical events; event detection; sensor range; autonomous drones; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSC.2014.062471

International Journal of Space-Based and Situated Computing, 2014 Vol.4 No.2, pp.114 - 124

Received: 24 Oct 2013
Accepted: 21 Jan 2014
Published online: 05 Jul 2014 *

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