Autonomous deployment of heterogeneous mobile agents with arbitrarily anisotropic sensing patterns

This article examines the problem of autonomous optimal deployment of the nodes in a sensor network with heterogeneous anisotropic patterns. The sensing footprints of the latter are allowed to be any arbitrary convex set instead of circular, while the members of the network are considered heterogeneous, as far as the scaling factor of the aforementioned pattern is concerned. The proposed coordination algorithm relies on suitable partitioning of the sensed space, based on certain Helly-type theorems for planar convex curves, guaranteeing distributed information flow. Results are further confirmed via simulation studies in comparison to circular-approximation-based ones.