Optimal coverage control of stationary and moving agents under effective coverage constraints

This paper addresses the problem of maximizing coverage in a mission space with both stationary and mobile agents such that effective coverage constraints are satisfied, i.e., each point of the mission space must be covered to a predefined level at least once over a given time period. The deployment of the stationary agents may be given in advance or may be obtained by a classical coverage control algorithm. The motion planning of the mobile agents is designed under maximal speed and acceleration constraints. When there is only one mobile agent, it is shown that its path planning and velocity planning can be designed separately. We first obtain an optimal velocity policy and the corresponding optimal coverage performance for a given path, which provides a criterion to prescribe a good path. Then, path planning is generated to meet the effective coverage constraint by connecting a set of “inspection points”. Inspired by the optimal velocity policy, we propose three methods to generate the inspection points and obtain the optimal order of connecting the inspection points by a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP)-based method. Finally, we extend the one-mobile-agent motion planning scheme to multiple mobile agents by proposing two methods. Simulation examples are included to compare the performance of the three methods for generating inspection points and compare the performance of the proposed methods for multiple mobile agents.