2016, Multiagent cooperative coverage control
Vision-inspired sensors integrated in a team of collaborating aerial robots have the potential to effectively collect information over a given environment. This work investigates the physics of such robots and implements a non linear control strategy to coordinate environment coverage using quadrocopters.
Mario Sposato's Master Thesis "Multiagent cooperative coverage control " addresses the problem of deploying a team of mobile sensing agents to provide coverage of an environment. The work presents a novel distributed algorithm to generate a sequence of waypoints for each agent, based on intermittent communication between the agents. The algorithm is shown to converge to an equilibrium configuration, while a measure of the environment coverage is shown to be monotonically nondecreasing. To fulfill the task of moving the agents to the designated waypoints, the thesis suggests a non-linear control algorithm based on backstepping, as well as a path planning strategy that
uses potential field navigation and collision avoidance. All the proposed algorithms have been tested in a simulated environment and on real-world aerial robots in the Smart Mobility Lab.
