Adaptive Action for Multi‐Agent Persistent Coverage
Carlos Franco, Gonzalo López Nicolás, Carlos Sagüés, Sergio Llorente · Asian Journal of Control · 2015
Abstract Persistent coverage with a team of agents refers to the task of covering an area where the coverage degrades with time. This is a dynamic task as opposed to the deployment problem. A key issue here is the coverage degradation that prevents the complete coverage fulfilment and requires persistence in the action. We propose a new method for persistent coverage where the agents' actions are computed in a partially distributed manner. The contribution is a control strategy based on variable coverage action and variable coverage range of the agents. This control provides adaptive behaviour in terms of actuator power and actuator domain in order to reduce the coverage error and energy consumption. The proposal is tested in simulation, showing clear improvement in terms of efficiency, flexibility, and scalability.