Coverage Control Inspired by Bacterial Chemotaxis

This paper considers distributed control of multi-agent systems, inspired by chemotaxis of bacteria. The chemotaxis is the biological phenomenon that organisms sense the concentration of a chemical in an environment and move toward or away from the highest concentration point. The problem considered here is a coverage problem, i.e., a problem of finding distributed controllers to steer agents so that they are placed uniformly on a given space. As a solution to this problem, we propose distributed controllers based on the mechanism of the chemotaxis. With the proposed controllers, each agent performs forward movement or random rotation depending on the difference between the current achievement degree of the coverage and the previous one. The performance of the proposed controllers is demonstrated by a numerical experiment. This result shows that multi-agent coordination in a distributed manner can be achieved by using the mechanism of the chemotaxis.