Persistent Coverage Control of Large-Scale Domains Using Multi-Agent Systems with Anisotropic Sensors

Multi-agent coverage control refers to the task of coordinating the position and motion of a group of mobile agents whose goal is to provide service or collect data from a given region. An ongoing research question within this topic is how to coordinate the motion and location of a team of non-zero-speed nonholonomic vehicles, such as fixed-wing aircraft, with anisotropic sensors of limited range. Motivated by this problem, this paper presents a control law that aims to provide persistent awareness over a bounded domain by a group of non-zero-speed nonholonomic vehicles. The control law explores the use of an awareness model and a novel curvature-based Voronoi partition to govern the distribution and motion of agents. Due to the nonholonomic nature of the vehicles and the use of anisotropic sensors, the proposed approach redefines the definition of distance in Voronoi cells using the minimum curvature of the vehicles. A simulation with a team of vehicles demonstrates the performance of the control approach.