K-robots clustering of moving sensors using coresets

We present an approach to position k servers (e.g. mobile robots) to provide a service to n independently moving clients; for example, in mobile ad-hoc networking applications where inter-agent distances need to be minimized, connectivity constraints exist between servers, and no a priori knowledge...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Feldman, Dan, Gil, Stephanie, Knepper, Ross A., Julian, Brian John, Rus, Daniela L.
Other Authors: Lincoln Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2014
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/90592
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5473-3566
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3964-2049
Description
Summary:We present an approach to position k servers (e.g. mobile robots) to provide a service to n independently moving clients; for example, in mobile ad-hoc networking applications where inter-agent distances need to be minimized, connectivity constraints exist between servers, and no a priori knowledge of the clients' motion can be assumed. Our primary contribution is an algorithm to compute and maintain a small representative set, called a kinematic coreset, of the n moving clients.We prove that, in any given moment, the maximum distance between the clients and any set of k servers is approximated by the coreset up to a factor of (1 ± ε), where ε > 0 is an arbitrarily small constant. We prove that both the size of our coreset and its update time is polynomial in k log(n)/ε. Although our optimization problem is NP-hard (i.e., takes time exponential in the number of servers to solve), solving it on the small coreset instead of the original clients results in a tractable controller. The approach is validated in a small scale hardware experiment using robot servers and human clients, and in a large scale numerical simulation using thousands of clients.