Persistent Coverage Control for Teams of Heterogeneous Agents - Extended Version

TL;DR

This paper introduces a distributed control law enabling heterogeneous robot teams to perform persistent coverage tasks in structured environments, ensuring collision avoidance and task completion through formal proofs and simulations.

Contribution

It presents a novel cooperative control strategy that accounts for heterogeneity in dynamics and sensing capabilities, validated by formal analysis and simulations.

Findings

Team successfully performs persistent coverage tasks.

No collisions occur between agents or with obstacles.

Simulation results validate the control law's effectiveness.

Abstract

A distributed cooperative control law for persistent coverage tasks is proposed, capable of coordinating a team of heterogeneous agents in a structured environment. Team heterogeneity is considered both at vehicles' dynamics and at coverage capabilities levels. More specifically, the general dynamics of nonholonomic vehicles are considered. Agent heterogeneous sensing capabilities are addressed by means of the descriptor function framework, a set of analytical tools for controlling agents involved in generic coverage tasks. By means of formal arguments, we prove that the team performs the task and no collision occurs between agents nor with obstacles. A numerical simulation validates the proposed strategy.