Voronoi coverage control with time-driven communication for mobile sensing networks with obstacles

It is known that the optimal sensor coverage of a mission space is performed by the Voronoi coverage. Aside from the energy required to move, communication among sensors consumes a large amount of their limited energy. So, to reduce communication energy, we propose a distributed control method that deploys sensors avoiding the obstacles by means of time-driven communication. We apply a potential field method to avoid obstacles. We propose a control method that consists of two processes: Voronoi update process and position update process. In the Voronoi update process, the sensor communicates with the other sensors and exchange information about their positions, periodically. Then, the sensing area of the sensor is updated using their positions. On the other hand, in the position update process, each sensor moves to the optimal position to increase its sensing performance on its sensing area which is fixed in the process. Thus, it does not need to communicate with the other sensors in the process. We show that a locally optimal sensor position is a locally uniformly asymptotically stable equilibrium point by the proposed method.