Higher order mobile coverage control with application to localization

Abstract: Most current results on coverage control using mobile sensors require that one partitioned cell is associated with precisely one sensor. In this paper, we consider a class of coverage control problems involving higher order Voronoi partitions, motivated by applications where more than one sensor is required to monitor and cover one cell. Such applications are frequent in scenarios requiring the sensors to localize targets. We introduce a framework depending on a coverage performance function incorporating higher order Voronoi cells and then design a gradient-based controller which allows the multi-sensor system to achieve a local equilibrium in a distributed manner. The convergence properties are studied and related to Lloyd algorithm. We study also the extension to coverage of a discrete set of points. In addition, we provide a number of real world scenarios where our framework can be applied. Simulation results are also provided to show the controller performance.