Distributed Coverage Control for Mobile Camera Sensor Networks With Anisotropic Perception

Coverage control is an essential technique in many autonomous multi-sensor systems, and how to realize efficient coverage control with mobile anisotropic sensors receives wide concern. In this paper, we design a coverage performance metric considering both the perception quality and the cover rate, and propose a distributed coverage control scheme for mobile anisotropic sensor networks with communication capability. Then we focus on a specific anisotropic sensor, the camera, to derive the distributed camera coverage control schemes under the front-view, top-view and pan-tilt-position camera scenarios, based on a camera sensing model characterizing the dependence of anisotropic perception trait on relative pose, field of view and focal length. Geometric interpretations are also derived by separating the gradient into integrals within the interior and along the boundary of partition cells. Numerical results validate the performance of our scheme in terms of cover rate, perception quality and communication cost, and show the improvement brought by simultaneous optimization of position and orientation as well as the influence of obstacles, communication loss and delay.