Cooperative and active sensing in mobile sensor networks for scalar field mapping

Scalar field mapping has many applications including environmental monitoring, search and rescue, etc. In such applications there is a need to achieve a certain level of confidence regarding the estimates at each location. In this paper, a cooperative and active sensing framework is developed to enable scalar field mapping using multiple mobile sensor nodes. The cooperative and active controller is designed via the real-time feedback of the sensing performance to steer the mobile sensors to new locations in order to improve the sensing quality. During the movement of the mobile sensors, the measurements from each sensor node and its neighbors are taken and fused with the corresponding confidences using distributed consensus filters. As a result an online map of the scalar field is built with a certain level of confidence of the estimates. We conducted computer simulations to validate and evaluate our proposed algorithms.