Cooperative multi‐agent sweep coverage control for unknown areas of irregular shape

Abstract

The study solves multi-agent cooperative control problems of covering irregularly-shaped unknown areas. A sweep coverage motion scheme is proposed: the agents are arranged in a row across the area and sweep through. The formation is flexible thus the agents can be scattered across the widest part and can queue up to pass through the narrowest portion. This allows the agents to cover the region by collectively passing through it only once, which may help to improve the survivability of reconnaissance vehicles. A distributed second-order control law is designed by modelling the agents as point masses in planar space. The approach is inspired by the motion of a string of balls connected by springs, thus virtual elastic force and potential field are applied to the agents, which introduces non-linearity to the system. Complete coverage as well as collision avoidance among agents and borders are guaranteed by parameter constraints that provided and validated via theoretical deduction and numerical simulations. Compared with the existing unknown-area coverage methods by randomly exploring the area, the proposed one yields more regular motion paths. Limitations of the work and future research directions are finally concluded.