Optimal mobile sensor motion planning under non-holonomic constraints for parameter estimation of distributed systems

Abstract: This paper presents a numerical solution for a mobile sensor motion trajectory scheduling problem under nonholonomic constraints of a project named MAS-net, which stands for Mobile Actuator-Sensor network. The motivation of the MAS-net project, at the first stage, is to estimate diffusion system parameters by networked mobile sensors. Each sensor is mounted on a differentially-driven mobile robot to observe the diffusing fog. In other words, this project requires to observe a parabolic distributed parameter systems (DPS) by nonholonomic networked mobile sensors. This paper reformulates this problem in the framework of optimal control and proposes a procedure to obtain a numerical solution by using RIOTS (Schwartz et al., 1997) and Matlab PDE Toolbox. The objective function of this method is designed to minimize the effect of the sensing noise. Extensive simulation results are presented for illustration.