The Price of Decentralization in Cooperative Coverage Problems With Energy-Constrained Agents

Abstract

A multiagent coverage problem is considered with energy-constrained agents, where a charging station is used to replenish an agent’s energy as it becomes depleted while performing the coverage task. The objective of this article is to compare the coverage performance between centralized and decentralized approaches. To this end, a centralized coverage control method is developed to switch agents between an optimal coverage formation and an optimal charging formation. We design a controller for agent trajectories that include dwell times at the optimal coverage locations, and charging times at the charging station to maximize a coverage metric over a finite time interval. Our controller guarantees that at any time there is at most one agent leaving the team for energy repletion. We also derive a tight bound, which allows us to quantify the gap between the coverage performance of the proposed strategy and the unknown globally optimal coverage performance.