A team-based deployment approach for heterogeneous mobile sensor networks

Abstract

This paper presents a distributed algorithm for deploying teams of heterogeneous agents to cover multiple regions of interest. A team-based approach is proposed here to minimize a locational cost function, defined with respect to various regions of interest, while each region is covered by intended agents. The main region is first partitioned into smaller regions among teams using the so-called Power diagram in such a way that larger regions are assigned to those teams that have higher capabilities. The immediate consequence of the difference between heterogeneous teams is an additional term that appears in control laws of their corresponding agents, which is determined by some calculations along their boundaries. The teams’ assigned regions are then partitioned among their members by the so-called multiplicatively-weighted (MW) Voronoi diagrams with guaranteed collision avoidance. A distributed control law is developed based on partitioning in team and agent levels to guarantee the convergence of agents to locally optimal positions. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed team-based weighted partitioning methods that enable distributed deployment of teams of heterogeneous agents.