Multi-agent Coverage Control: From Discrete Assignments to Continuous Multi-agent Distribution Matching

TL;DR

This paper reviews the broad spectrum of multi-agent coverage control problems, from discrete task assignments to continuous distribution matching, highlighting common features and recent references across different deployment strategies.

Contribution

It provides a unified perspective on various coverage control formulations, connecting discrete and continuous approaches and introducing novel references for large-scale swarm deployment.

Findings

Unified framework for discrete and continuous coverage control

Analysis of static coverage via area partitioning and assignment

Discussion of continuum task assignment for large swarms

Abstract

The multi-agent spatial coverage control problem encompasses a broad research domain, dealing with both dynamic and static deployment strategies, discrete-task assignments, and spatial distribution-matching deployment. Coverage control may involve the deployment of a finite number of agents or a continuum through centralized or decentralized, locally-interacting schemes. All these problems can be solved via a different taxonomy of deployment algorithms for multiple agents. Depending on the application scenario, these problems involve from purely discrete descriptions of tasks (finite loads) and agents (finite resources), to a mixture of discrete and continuous elements, to fully continuous descriptions of the same. Yet, it is possible to find common features that underline all the above formulations, which we aim to illustrate here. By doing so, we aim to point the reader to novel references related to these problems. The short article outline is the following: Static coverage via concurrent area partitioning and assignment; Static coverage as a discrete task assignment; and Continuum task assignment for large-scale swarms.