TY - JOUR
T1 - Coverage control of mobile agents using multi-step broadcast control
AU - Darmaraju, Shalini
AU - Kamal, Md Abdus Samad
AU - Shanmugavel, Madhavan
AU - Tan, Chee Pin
N1 - Funding Information:
This research is partly supported by the Fundamental Research Grant of Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia, FRGS/1/2016/TK04/MUSM/02/1 and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grant-in-Aids for Scientific Research (C) 20K04531.
Publisher Copyright:
© Authors 2022.
PY - 2022/9
Y1 - 2022/9
N2 - This paper proposes a novel multi-step broadcast control (MBC) scheme to deploy a group of autonomous mobile agents for accomplishing coverage tasks in a bounded region. Traditional broadcast control (BC) schemes use a one-to-all communication framework to transmit a uniform signal to all agents, making it cost-effective compared with any all-to-all communication-based scheme for a multi-agent system. However, as BC schemes are based on a single-step view of the environment for decision-making, the environment's varying distribution density is not known immediately to the agents, resulting in suboptimal performance. To overcome this drawback, this paper proposes an MBC scheme, where agents use a predictive multi-step view and are able to detect the varying densities in the environment ahead of time. The local controller output is estimated using a weighted averaging technique which assigns a higher weight to immediate steps; this feature compensates for any decrease in prediction accuracy as the number of steps increases. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MBC scheme using a coverage task over a region with uneven population density. Compared to existing BC schemes, the proposed MBC scheme shows superior convergence characteristics in task accomplishment and deployment efficiency.
AB - This paper proposes a novel multi-step broadcast control (MBC) scheme to deploy a group of autonomous mobile agents for accomplishing coverage tasks in a bounded region. Traditional broadcast control (BC) schemes use a one-to-all communication framework to transmit a uniform signal to all agents, making it cost-effective compared with any all-to-all communication-based scheme for a multi-agent system. However, as BC schemes are based on a single-step view of the environment for decision-making, the environment's varying distribution density is not known immediately to the agents, resulting in suboptimal performance. To overcome this drawback, this paper proposes an MBC scheme, where agents use a predictive multi-step view and are able to detect the varying densities in the environment ahead of time. The local controller output is estimated using a weighted averaging technique which assigns a higher weight to immediate steps; this feature compensates for any decrease in prediction accuracy as the number of steps increases. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MBC scheme using a coverage task over a region with uneven population density. Compared to existing BC schemes, the proposed MBC scheme shows superior convergence characteristics in task accomplishment and deployment efficiency.
KW - area coverage control
KW - broadcast control
KW - multi-agent system
KW - wireless coverage
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85125799883&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/S0263574722000194
DO - 10.1017/S0263574722000194
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85125799883
SN - 0263-5747
VL - 40
SP - 3290
EP - 3305
JO - Robotica
JF - Robotica
IS - 9
ER -