An Optimal Control Approach to Decentralized Energy-Efficient Coverage Problems

Abstract

One of the challenges of working with multi-agent systems is the limited energy of the agents, especially when the agents are flying vehicles with limited batteries to save weight. The main contribution of this paper is to formulate the energy-efficient coverage problem as an optimal control problem. The optimal control problem will be related to Lloyd's algorithm. The solution to the optimal control problem is spatially distributed over Delaunay graphs and provides an energy-efficient local controller to maximize the coverage. As a second contribution, by imposing constraints on the parameters of the optimal control problem we guarantee that the agents maintain their energy during the coverage task. As expected, weighting the speed of the agents against the coverage objective will decrease energy consumption in the multi-agent system. Several examples demonstrate the performance of the energy-efficient approach.