Low Complexity Target Coverage Heuristics Using Mobile Cameras

Wireless sensor and actuator networks have been extensively deployed for enhancing industrial control processes and supply-chains, and many forms of surveillance and environmental monitoring. The availability of low-cost mobile robots equipped with a variety of sensors in addition to communication and computational capabilities makes them particularly promising in target coverage tasks for ad hoc surveillance, where quick, low-cost or non-lasting visual sensing solutions are required, e.g. in border protection and disaster recovery. In this paper, we consider the problem of low complexity placement and orientation of mobile cameras to cover arbitrary targets. We tackle this problem by clustering proximal targets, while calculating/estimating the camera location/direction for each cluster separately through our cover-set coverage method. Our proposed solutions provide extremely computationally efficient heuristics with only a small increase in number of cameras used, and a small decrease in number of covered targets.