Coverage control by robotic networks with limited-range anisotropic sensory

This paper considers the deployment of a network of robotic agents with limited-range communication and anisotropic sensing capabilities. We encode the environment coverage provided by the network by means of an expected- value objective function. This function has a gradient which is not amenable to distributed computation. We provide a constant-factor approximation of this measure via an alternative aggregate objective function whose gradient is spatially distributed over the limited-range Delaunay proximity graph. We characterize the smoothness properties of the aggregate expected-value function and propose a distributed deployment algorithm to optimize it. Simulations illustrate the results.