On performance measurement for a heterogeneous planar field sensor network

Mobile sensors deployment over a target area is an important problem for autonomous operations in applications such as surveillance and environmental monitoring. The problem of optimal deployment of heterogeneous anisotropic field sensor network, having different sensing range, is addressed in this paper. A sensor coverage model for a planar field sensor is developed through introducing a performance measure which reveals the sensor's coverage strength. In addition, a gradient based control law was introduced using a modified Voronoi partitioning. This control law regulates the sensors toward the direction that represents the gradient direction of the performance function, subject to the speed constraint of the sensor. A circular sector is selected as a simulation example of the planar field sensor coverage model to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed idea for task optimization.