Timer-Based Coverage Control for Mobile Sensors

This work investigates the coverage control problem over a static, bounded, and convex workspace and develops a hybrid extension of the continuous-time Lloyd algorithm. Each agent in a multi-agent system (MAS) is equipped with a timer mechanism that generates intermittent measurement and control update events, which may occur asynchronously between agents. Between consecutive event times, as determined by the corresponding timer mechanism, the controller of each agent is held constant. These controllers are shown to drive the configuration of the MAS into a neighborhood of the set of centroidal Voronoi configurations, i.e., a local minimizer of the standard locational cost. The combination of continuous-time dynamics with intermittently updated control inputs is modeled as a hybrid system. The coverage objective is posed as a set attractivity problem for hybrid systems, where an invariance-based convergence analysis yields sufficient conditions that ensure maximal solutions of the hybrid system asymptotically converge to a desired set. A brief simulation example is included to showcase the result.