A mobile sensor distributed cooperative searching and coverage strategy in unknown environments

The initial deployment of sensor nodes is random, which causes the disability of quickly covering ROI in unknown environments. To solve this problem, in this paper a mobile sensor distributed cooperative searching and coverage strategy in unknown environments was proposed. When searching region of interest (ROI), a node may come across others, then those nodes form a one-way chained formation which is perpendicular to the search direction of leader by using dynamical leader updating method to maximize searching efficiency. After some node in the formation finds ROI, based on neighbor following strategy, the leader is switched to make sure the rest of the nodes follow it until reaching at ROI. Every node seeks the most important position independently in ROI, until the most important region has been covered. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can quickly seek ROI out, and accomplish the optimal coverage. It is not affected by the broken nodes with strong robustness.