Decentralized Coverage Control for Multi-Agent Systems with Nonlinear Dynamics

Alireza DIRAFZOON  Mohammad Bagher MENHAJ  Ahmad AFSHAR  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E94-D   No.1   pp.3-10
Publication Date: 2011/01/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
DOI: 10.1587/transinf.E94.D.3
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (IEICE/IEEE Joint Special Section on Autonomous Decentralized Systems Technologies and Their Application to Networked Systems)
Category: Community
Keyword: 
networked control systems,  sensor networks,  coverage problem,  nonholonomic mobile robots,  collision avoidance,  

Full Text: PDF>>
Buy this Article



Summary: 
In this paper, we study the decentralized coverage control problem for an environment using a group of autonomous mobile robots with nonholonomic kinematic and dynamic constraints. In comparison with standard coverage control procedures, we develop a combined controller for Voronoi-based coverage approach in which kinematic and dynamic constraints of the actual mobile sensing robots are incorporated into the controller design. Furthermore, a collision avoidance component is added in the kinematic controller in order to guarantee a collision free coverage of the area. The convergence of the network to the optimal sensing configuration is proven with a Lyapunov-type analysis. Numerical simulations are provided approving the effectiveness of the proposed method through several experimental scenarios.