Decentralized Persistent Area Coverage Control with Loss of Awareness

Abstract

This paper presents a decentralized, hybrid control approach for persistent area coverage control applications. The hybrid cooperative control framework builds on the concepts of cellular automata and awareness-based model to guarantee safe coverage of a large-scale domain by a network of mobile wireless sensors with bounded input disturbances and limited communication and sensing ranges. The framework only requires communication among nearby agents at discrete intervals of time, reducing the communication among agents. Results are validated through simulation and experiments with a team of ten differential-drive mobile robots.