A novel bio-inspired distributed coverage controller for pollution monitoring

The Voronoi partition method can provide a coverage to an area of interest and has gained a lot of popularity when compared with other coverage schemes such as virtual springs and deterministic annealing. This paper presents the development of a novel bio-inspired algorithm that uses a behaviour based approach to solve the problem of coverage. It is shown that by combining a source seeking behaviour - bacteria chemotaxis and a group foraging behaviour - flocking, it is possible to provide coverage to an area of interest and obtain results similar to that obtained by using the Voronoi partition method. Experimental results show that the novel coverage algorithm can out perform the voronoi partition method when presented with some case study scenarios. © 2011 IEEE.