Recently, Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) are getting growing interest from research community because of their potential for enormous range of applications. Actors in WSANs are capable to perform application-oriented actions in response to sensor detected events such as extinguish fire and rescue survivors. To perform such actions, efficient actor placement is extremely crucial for the actors to cover the area of interest. Moreover, maintaining strong inter-actor connectivity is extremely desirable for the actors to interact with each other and synchronize their operation. However, most application environments of WSANs are inaccessible due to harsh terrain; therefore random deployment of nodes becomes an inherent choice. Random placement of actors often strangles coverage and leads to high concentration deployment. Therefore, it becomes imperative to pursue autonomous dispersion. The prime objective of this work is to improve the connected coverage while minimizing the movement overhead. This paper presents a localized and distributed Movement Control Actor Relocation (MCAR) algorithm. The MCAR pursues post-deployment actor repositioning in such a way that actors repel each other for better coverage while staying connected. Simulation results validate the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of connected coverage and resource efficiency. The results show that MCAR can reduce distance movement up to 32 while improving coverage up to 29 compared to contemporary schemes. © 2012 IEEE.