Coverage control and localization with sensor networks
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Indefinite
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Abstract
Motivated by the widespread applications of teams of mobile sensor nodes that collectively accomplish a common objective, this thesis has focusee on the study of the coverage control problem and its implementation. The objective of coverage control problem is to deploy multiple sensor nodes in an environment, often termed "mission space", so as to maximize a certain objective function. The main contribution ofthis thesis is propose provide a theoretical analysis and experimental implementation of coverage control algorithm, which extends a prior one in the literature.
The convergence analysis for the gradient based coverage control algorithm developed previously in the CODES lab is first presented. This is achieved first by recognizing the non-smooth nature ofthe objective function and understanding the solution to the coverage control problem in the Filippov sense. Then, it is shown that the solution converges to an invariant set via the generalized LaSalle's Invariance Principle. Furthermore, to get an improved deployment of sensor nodes, a self-boosting algorithm is proposed. By the self- boosting algorithm, each sensor node has a modified objective function to optimize, which induces it to explore more uncovered areas and finally converges to the common objective function defined for the original coverage control problem. Thus, the final deployment yielded by the self-boosting algorithm is an improved maximum of the original problem.
The implementation of the coverage control algorithm studied in this thesis motivates another research problem, which is the localization of sensor nodes. Sensor nodes are initially randomly deployed in the mission space and an algorithm is designed in this thesis localizes the sensor nodes based on a line-feature-based map of the mission space. Each sensor node is able to find its accurate location after collecting information from the environment, reasoning and estimating its locations based on the collected data.
The coverage control and localization algorithms proposed in this thesis are all validated in experiments performed in the hallways of the photonics building at Boston University.
Description
Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University
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