Coverage Control of Unicycle Agents under Constant Speed Constraints

This paper studies the problem of optimal coverage control over a convex bounded region by a group of unicycle-type mobile agents with constant speeds. We further assume that the constant speeds for different agents may be non-identical. Thus, a unicycle is controlled solely via steering of its orie...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liu, Q., Ye, Mengbin, Sun, Z., Qin, J., Yu, C.
Format: Journal Article
Published: 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/84360
Description
Summary:This paper studies the problem of optimal coverage control over a convex bounded region by a group of unicycle-type mobile agents with constant speeds. We further assume that the constant speeds for different agents may be non-identical. Thus, a unicycle is controlled solely via steering of its orientation in which a virtual centre is defined for each unicycle. A basic controller is proposed which asymptotically drive the virtual centres to a Centroidal Voronoi configuration, thus achieving the optimal coverage objective. At the Centroidal Voronoi configuration, each unicycle executes steady-state circular orbit about its virtual centre. To overcome a drawback of the basic controller that requires a careful selection of initial conditions, a modified switching controller is proposed which achieves a Centroidal Voronoi configuration for arbitrarily chosen initial conditions. Simulations for both the basic and modified controllers are presented for a five-unicycle group.