Determining Locations of Circles to Optimally Cover a Polygon

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I want to completely cover a region on a map(Continental US)/polygon with circles of a certain radius. Is there a way to determine the best locations and how many circles would be needed to completely cover the polygon? A certain threshold of overlap would be allowed.

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Some recent work uses the phrase "connected sensor cover" for this problem, and you can find literature by searching for that phrase, e.g.,

S. Funke, A. Kesselman, F. Kuhn, Z. Lotker, and M. Segal. "Improved approximation algorithms for connected sensor cover." Wirel. Netw., 13(2):153–164, Apr. 2007. (Springer link.)

There is a long history of related work. Here is one paper from the math literature:

R. Kershner. "The number of circles covering a set." American Journal of Mathematics, pages 665–671, 2010. (Jstor link.)