A Distributed Deployment Strategy for a Network of Cooperative Autonomous Vehicles

This brief presents a distributed deployment algorithm for a network of heterogeneous mobile agents to minimize a prescribed cost function. This function is concerned with the cost of serving the entire field by all agents, where the so called operation cost of different agents are not necessarily the same. The problem is investigated for the case where agents have different types of dynamics. Using a multiplicatively-weighted Voronoi diagram, the field is partitioned to smaller regions (one for each agent). A distributed coverage control law is then provided that guarantees the convergence of agents to the optimal configuration with respect to the above-mentioned cost function. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by simulations and experiments on a testbed with two types of unmanned vehicles (aerial and ground).