Target Tracking with Limited Sensing Range in Autonomous Mobile Sensor Networks

As technology advancements in robotics and wireless communication, tracking mobile targets using mobile sensors has aroused widespread concern in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel coordinative moving strategy for autonomous mobile sensor networks to guarantee the target can be detected in each observed step while minimizing the amount of moving sensors. The proposed scheme consists of obtaining the current position of the target, which is then used to predict the next time-step location of the target. Once the uncertainty region of the target's position is defined, the proposed method allows the mobile sensors to cover it in an optimal way. Therefore, we can assign each mobile sensor to an optimal location to cover the uncertainty region while minimizing the total traveled distance of sensors. Extensive simulations are given to evaluated performance and demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed strategy.