Nonuniform Coverage with Time-Varying Risk Density Function

• Main Author: Yazdan Panah, Arian
• Other Authors: Spinello, Davide
• Language: en
• Published: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa 2015
• Subjects: Nonuniform coverage; Risk density function; Agents; Asymptotic stability; Co–operative control; Optimization problems; Voronoi tessellation; State feedback
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10393/33007; http://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-4106

Multi-agent systems are extensively used in several applications. An important class of applications involves the optimal spatial distribution of a group of mobile robots on a given area, where the optimality refers to the assignment of subregions to the robots, in such a way that a suitable coverage metric is maximized. Typically the coverage metric encodes a risk distribution defined on the area, and a measure of the performance of individual robots with respect to points inside the region of interest. The coverage metric will be maximized when the set of mobile robots configure themselves as the centroids of the Voronoi tessellation dictated by the risk density. In this work we advance on this result by considering a generalized area control problem in which the coverage metric is non-autonomous, that coverage metric is time varying independently of the states of the robots. This generalization is motivated by the study of coverage control problems in which the coordinated motion of a set of mobile robots accounts for the kinematics of objects penetrating from the outside. Asymptotic convergence and optimality of the non-autonmous system are studied by means of Barbalat's Lemma, and connections with the kinematics of the moving intruders is established. Several numerical simulation results are used to illustrate theoretical predictions.