Cooperative pollution supervising and neutralization with multi-actuator-sensor network

The present work considers a scenario that a multiactuator-sensor network neutralizes poisonous gas and tracks the pollution sources in a bounded area. A novel algorithm is proposed to minimize the system information uncertainty while reaching balance on the workload of actuators. The method combines the centroidal Voronoi tessellations (CVT) with a consensus strategy. The CVT of the region insures a local optimal position configuration of the actuators, thus the sensing uncertainty can be minimized. The consensus algorithm utilizes the connection information among actuators, and helps them to reach a common workload. The consensus component will be terminated or suppressed when the workload is averaged. The consensus component may postpone the realization of CVT configuration. But it could be viewed as a perturbation that helps the actuators jump out of the local optimal CVT configuration. As a result, the information uncertainty may be further reduced. Comparison is drawn between the pure CVT algorithm and the method with consensus strategy. Simulations validated the proposed approach.