Decentralized redistribution for cooperative patrol
Brandon J. Moore, Kevin M. Passino · International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control · 2007
Abstract This paper addresses the problem of enabling a group of autonomous vehicles to effectively patrol an environment significantly larger than their communication and sensing radii. Our formulation uses ana priorispatial decomposition of the environment into smaller areas in order to provide a framework for the allocation of vehicles to different parts of the environment. We develop a distributed cooperative control algorithm that transfers vehicles between these areas based on only local information and prove that it achieves the proper environment‐wide distribution of vehicles within a finite time interval. Various applications are discussed and simulations are included to illustrate convergence dynamics as well as to quantify practical performance as a function of problem parameters. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.