Obstacle Discovery in Distributed Actuator and Sensor Networks * Rong Zheng and Amit Pendharkar Department of Computer Science University of Houston Houston, TX, 77204, USA http://www.cs.uh.edu Technical Report Number UH-CS-08-16 December 20, 2008 Keywords: Active Sensing, Segment Voronoi Diagram, Obstacle Detection. Abstract Distributed active sensing is a new sensing paradigm, where active sensors (a.k.a actuators) as illuminating sources and passive sensors as receivers are distributed in a field, and collaboratively detect interested events. 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. * This work was in part supported by US National Science Foundation under contract NSF CNS-0832089.