Effective Control for Wireless Sensor and Mobile Actuator Network in Regulation of Environmental Density Function

Abstract

This paper proposes an environmental regulating system by using a multi-robot system in cooperation with wireless sensor networks. Wireless sensors pre-deployed in the environment and embedded in mobile robots can gather sensory information to estimate the distribution of environmental variable. The environment distribution is illustrated by a density function which is constructed by Gaussian mixture model based on Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate real condition. Subsequently, a gradient decent coverage control is proposed to drive the multi-robot system to cover the optimal distribution based on the estimated density function. Meanwhile, the actuators embedded on mobile robots are designed to regulate the environment to achieve a desired value of density function. Numerical examples are illustrated to show the performance of the proposed control system.Keywords: Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs), coverage control, expectation maximization estimation, gradient descent algorithm, Lyapunov-based controller.