Abstract— In this paper the coverage control for mobile sensor networks is studied. The novelty is to consider an anisotropic sensor model where the performance of the sensor depends not only on the distance but also on the orientation from the sensor to the target. Moreover we consider sensors with limited-range sensing defined by a probabilistic model and we assume that each robot is equipped with omni-directional communication capability. A gradient-based distributed algorithm is designed to maximize the joint detection probabilities of the events in the region of interest by the sensors. Simulations illustrate the results.