Distributed partitioning strategies for perimeter patrolling

In this work we study the problem of real-time optimal distributed partitioning for perimeter patrolling in the context of multi-camera networks for surveillance. The objective is to partition a line of fixed length into non-overlapping segments, each assigned to a different camera to patrol. Each camera has both physical mobility range and limited speed, and it must patrol its assigned segment by sweeping it back and forth at maximum speed. Here we propose three different distributed control strategies to determine the extremes of the patrolling areas of each camera. All these strategies require only local communication with the neighboring cameras but adopt different communication schemes: synchronous, asynchronous symmetric gossip and asynchronous asymmetric gossip. For the first two schemes we provide theoretical convergence guarantees, while for the last scheme we provide numerical simulations showing the effectiveness of the proposed solution.