Coordination of multiple vehicles for area coverage tasks

Area coverage operations such as plowing a field or mowing a lawn can be performed faster if multiple vehicles are involved. To use a team of automated vehicles safely and effectively they must be coordinated to avoid collisions and deadlock situations. Unexpected events may occur during the operation which may affect vehicles´ velocities, so the coordination method must be robust with respect to these events. In this paper, a path coordination method is introduced which delays decisions about mission coordination as long as possible during mission execution so such unexpected situations are efficiently handled. The method´s computation speed and solution quality are evaluated through simulation, and compared with two other methods based on common path coordination techniques.