Awareness coverage control over large scale domains with intermittent communications

In this paper a novel dynamic awareness coverage model is proposed and applied to coverage control over a large-scale task domain for a decentralized multi-vehicle sensor network with intermittent communications and possibly faulty sensors. For each vehicle, an individual state of awareness is defined. The individual vehicle´s state of awareness continuously evolves based on the vehicle´s motion and is updated at discrete instants whenever the vehicle establishes a new range- based communication link with other vehicles. This information sharing update step aides in reducing the amount of redundant coverage. In this paper we first consider the simplifying assumption where no awareness loss occurs when no sensors are monitoring portions of the domain. This scenario is applicable to some search and rescue/retrieval problems (especially with static victims or objects of interests), domain monitoring, and low level surveillance. Under this assumption, a decentralized control strategy is proposed that guarantees that every point within the task domain will be covered with a satisfactory state of awareness even under intermittent communications and/or faulty sensors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the novel awareness model and decentralized control law via numerical simulations.