Cooperative Control of Networked Robotic Systems
Yiannis Stergiopoulos · 2014
ii The main scope of this thesis is the design and analysis of distributed control strate-gies for achieving optimum area coverage in mobile sensor networks. Due to the numerous applications of the latter in missions as area exploration, environmen-tal sampling, patrolling, or even security, a large part of the scientific community has turned its interest on developing methods for achieving optimum, if possible, sensing environmental perception by groups of autonomous mobile agents. Such robotic teams, randomly deployed in areas of interest initially, are designed to co-ordinate their motion in a distributed manner, rather than via a global supervisory system, in order to succeed in the corresponding mission objective. At the first stages of this thesis, the coverage problem of an area of interest by a group of identical nodes is examined from a numerical point of view. The mobile nodes are considered to be governed by simple discrete–time kinodynamic motion, while their sensing performance is assumed radial, range–limited, uniform around