Experimental study on persistent coverage control with information decay

This paper presents an experimental study of persistent coverage control for mobile sensor networks. The objective of this paper is to lead mobile sensors to an optimal configuration over a mission space in the presence of persistent change in the measured environmental. For this purpose, we introduce the concept of information decay, which means that the reliability of the measured information decays with time. We first formulate the persistent coverage control problem and then present a control algorithm that is maximizing the objective function persistently under information decay. The feature of the present algorithm is to combine a standard coverage control scheme with a time-dependent sensing information function. We finally demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented algorithm through experiments on a testbed.