Self-deployment and coverage of mobile sensors within a bounded region

The paper studies self-deployment and coverage problems in a bounded region with mobile sensors (agents). A distributed self-deployment strategy is designed for the purpose of coverage based on artificial potential methods. It is shown that collections of mobile sensors eventually converge to a steady configuration while avoiding colliding each other and avoiding colliding with the boundary by employing shadow agents on the boundary to generate repulsive forces. Furthermore, three steady configurations of uniform lattices (including T-lattice, S-lattice, and H-lattice) are analyzed in an approximate way. An estimation on the total number of agents is presented to attain the desired T-lattice, which can achieve Lull coverage within a bounded region. Finally, for different uniform lattices, the potential energy is compared to indicate that T-lattice will be formed it local minimums are avoided.