Deployment of drifters in a piecewise-constant flow environment

We study a deployment strategy for a group of vehicles that drift in an ambient flow field. Specifically, we address the case where the flow is always greater in magnitude than an individual vehicle's speed, thus individual agents are not able to maintain constant positions. For analytic tractability, we make the assumption that the flow can be approximated as a piecewise constant vector field. This results in interesting phenomena regarding minimum-time optimal solutions at the interface between two different constant flows. We characterize these optimal trajectories and then specify an area maximizing cooperative coverage algorithm that agents in the flow can implement in a distributed manner.

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