A swarm-based approach to dynamic coverage control of multi-agent systems

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a swarm-based dynamic coverage scheme where we consider groups of coverage agents that behave as swarms for completing the coverage task. Agents are deployed to uncovered regions via swarming control where a leader agent selects a target position that is in an uncovered region while all other agents are commanded to swarm around the leader agent’s target position. Coverage and swarming control inputs are decoupled, meaning that only one of them is active at a given time. Through the decoupling of these control inputs, we attain simpler control problems that we analyze separately for different behavior modes and provide stability results for the overall control schemes through Lyapunov-like analysis for two different cases: swarms of kinematic unicycle agents and multiple swarms of single-integrator agents. In addition to the coverage objective, we design control inputs for collision and static obstacle avoidance and proximity maintenance.