Distributed Control of Multi-Agent Systems With Limited Communication Range in the Fixed Obstacle Environments

Abstract

This paper presents distributed algorithms for the coordination of a multi-agent network to minimize a prescribed cost function. The problem is studied for both cases of an environment without obstacles and an environment with fixed obstacles. The centric multiplicatively weighted Voronoi configuration is introduced, which is proved to be optimal for the former case. A distributed coverage control strategy is also proposed under which the agents’ configuration is guaranteed to converge to this optimal configuration. For the case, when the communication range of every agent is limited, the notions of limited communication MW-Voronoi diagram and limited communication visibility-aware MW-Voronoi diagram are introduced, and appropriate motion coordination strategies are provided for both the cases of an environment without obstacles and an environment with obstacles. The simulation results demonstrate that the efficacy of the proposed coordination techniques.