Target tracking with guaranteed coverage in autonomous mobile sensor networks

The advancements in robotics and wireless communication provide a good opportunity to combine the mobility and wireless sensor networks so that different objectives can be satisfied simultaneously with less required resources. Specifically, mobility enables the sensors to dynamically adjust their positions for better sensing quality, and offers a higher probability for guaranteeing the coverage required at the same time. In this paper, we propose a novel coordinating scheme for autonomous mobile sensor networks so that the target sensing quality is optimized while the coverage requirement of the field of interest is also guaranteed. The whole problem is transformed into one finite horizon optimization problem, which is then solved efficiently. Extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.