Multiagent cooperative coverage control

Abstract: In this work, the problem of deploying a team of mobile sensing agents to provide coverage of an environment is addressed. We propose a novel distributed algorithm to generate a sequence of waypoints for each agent, based on intermittent communication between the agents. The algorithm is shown to converge to an equilibrium configuration, while a measure of the environment coverage is shown to be monotonically nondecreasing. To fulfill the task of moving the agents to the designated waypoints, we develop a non-linear control algorithm based on backstepping, as well as a path planning strategy that uses potential field navigation and collision avoidance. All the proposed algorithms are tested in a simulated environment and on real-world aerial robots.