Cooperative control and optimization in an uncertain, asynchronous, wireless, networked world

Cooperative control arises when a system consists of multiple distributed components (e.g., nodes in a sensor network) that jointly function to meet a system-wide objective, often in an uncertain environment. It involves communication among components which is typically carried out asynchronously, wirelessly, and subject to limitations such as energy or physical constraints in the environment. In most cases, the performance of such systems depends on how its components (which we will refer to as “nodes” in a network) are located within a given mission space, which gives rise to the fundamental problem of coverage control or active sensing [1],[2],[3],[4],[5]. We will specifically concentrate on cooperative control and optimization problems that arise when sensor networks are deployed to detect and extract information from events occurring in a mission space. In general, the nodes need to perform the following three tasks simultaneously: Task 1 - Coverage Control: Nodes perform motion control to reach an optimal deployment which maximizes the probability of event detection. After an event is detected, it is referred to as a data source or target. Task 2 - Data Source Detection: Nodes actively run a procedure for detecting and locating emerging data sources. This usually returns binary results corrupted by false alarm and missed detection errors. Thus, we need to model such uncertainty in the detection process in order to provide reliable information to Task 3. Task 3 - Data Collection: Sensor nodes gather information from detected data sources. To achieve higher data collection quality, the sensor nodes need to adjust their locations according to the known data source locations.