Coverage Control with Information Decay in Dynamic Environments

Abstract In this paper a method for coverage control for a convex region D ⊂ ℝ 2 in a dynamic environment is studied. An information map is introduced in which the information about each point is decaying with respect to time s.t. the robots must revisit them periodically. Also a time-varying density function is used for modeling moving points of interest. The considered gradient based control approach causes the cost function to stay within the desired bounds. But due to the non-stationary problem setup caused by the information decay it does not converge to a single point but to a bounded set, such that the robots keep gathering information continuously. With this method it is possible to gather information about several points of interest within the region D with only a few robots. In the end simulation results are presented to outline the effectiveness of the proposed control law.