Supervised coverage control of multi-agent systems

In this paper, we consider a dynamic coverage problem for multi-agent systems, where the main objective of a group of mobile agents is to explore a given compact region. We propose a novel control scheme, where we introduce a supervisor that assists a group of agents with the centralized coverage control law and the global trajectory tracking control law. The coverage control law ensures the coverage task is done until the agents end up in local minima, and when they do, the global trajectory tracking control law ensures that the agents are deployed to uncovered regions. Our control scheme is designed to be decoupled such that only one control law is active at a given time. In addition to the coverage objective, we design control laws for coverage agents to avoid collisions and maintain proximity to a supervisor. Moreover, we utilize feedback linearization to use the proposed control scheme for coverage control of kinematic unicycle agents. We validate our approach via numerical simulations. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.