Obstacle discovery in distributed actuator and sensor networks

Distributed active sensing is a new sensing paradigm, where active sensors (aka actuators) as illuminating sources and passive sensors as receivers are distributed in a field, and collaboratively detect events of interest. In this paper, we study the fundamental properties of distributed actuator and sensor networks (DASNs) in detecting and localizing obstacles. A novel notion of “exposure” is defined, which quantifies the dimension limitations in detectability. Using simple geometric constructs, we propose polynomial-time algorithms to compute the exposure and bounding regions where the center of the obstacles may lie.