Coverage control for homogeneous mobile sensors with input constraints on a unit circle

This paper addresses the coverage control problem for a network of homogeneous mobile sensors with first order discrete-time dynamics, where the goal is to minimize a coverage cost function which is defined as the largest distance from any point on a unit circle to its nearest sensor. Due to the existence of a maximum velocity for each sensor in practice, input saturation for the sensors needs to be taken into consideration. Distributed coverage control laws with input constraints are developed to drive the sensors to the final configuration such that the coverage cost function is minimized It is also shown that the spatial order of the mobile sensors is preserved throughout the network's evolution. As a result, collision avoidance between mobile sensors is always guaranteed.