Persistent Coverage Control for Teams of Heterogeneous Agents - Extended Version
For multi-robot systems, it addresses the challenge of coordinating heterogeneous agents with different dynamics and sensing capabilities in persistent coverage tasks.
The paper proposes a distributed control law for persistent coverage with heterogeneous agents, proving task completion and collision avoidance, validated by simulation.
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.