Robust sensor coverage in the presence of spatial obstacles and exclusion zones

Abstract

In this article, we develop a robust optimization framework for obstacle-aware aerial directional sensor networks operating under positional uncertainty using a sector-based sensing model. The monitoring area is discretized into grid points and a unified geometric formulation is developed to model directional sensing while explicitly accounting for obstacle-induced visibility loss and exclusion regions. To enhance sensing performance under uncertainty, three progressive optimization strategies, namely robust aerial grid coverage (RAGC), robust aerial target coverage (RATC) and robust aerial target scheduling (RATS), are proposed. The framework employs robust orientation optimization based on the radius of robust feasibility to maximize effective grid and target coverage under sensor perturbations, followed by a target-aware sleep scheduling mechanism that minimizes the number of active sensors without compromising target monitoring. Extensive simulations under varying target distributions, obstacle configurations, uncertainty levels and sensor failure scenarios demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves robust and energy-efficient sensing while consistently outperforming representative approaches from the literature in terms of coverage quality, target monitoring and sensor utilization.