Coverage control with anytime updates for persistent surveillance missions

Coordination schemes for multi-agent surveillance missions typically require ideal data transfer between spatially separated agents, an assumption that is too restrictive for many realistic missions. This paper develops dynamic coverage control algorithms that only require unplanned and sporadic exchanges between mobile agents and a central base station. In particular, the proposed schemes are designed to operate within a decomposition-based multi-agent surveillance framework, which pairs dynamic partitioning with single-agent routing. The present work extends our previous work [13] by introducing two alternative coverage update rules that operate in anytime. We show that these variations add robustness to premature algorithmic termination, while preserving many desirable properties, namely, production of connected coverage regions, assurance of persistent coverage, and convergence to a Pareto optimal configuration in certain conditions.