Supervised coverage control with guaranteed collision avoidance and proximity maintenance

In this paper, we study the dynamic coverage problem for multi-agent systems. Qualitatively, the coverage goal can be described as gathering sensory information for each point in a given region up to a desired prescribed level. In order to achieve the coverage goal, we propose a novel control scheme, where we introduce a supervisor that assists a group of coverage agents with i) coverage control law and ii) 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 such that the two control laws are decoupled, meaning that only one of them is active at a given time. In addition to the coverage objective, we design control laws in order to guarantee that there are no collisions between the agents and they always operate sufficiently close to the supervisor.