Distributed cooperative deployment of heterogeneous autonomous agents: a Pareto suboptimal approach

Abstract

SUMMARYThe paper presents a distributed cooperative control law for autonomous deployment of a team of heterogeneous agents. Deployment problems deal with the coordination of groups of agents in order to cover one or more assigned areas of the operational space. In particular, we consider a team composed by agents with different dynamics, sensing capabilities, and resources available for the deployment. Sensing heterogeneity is addressed by means of the descriptor function framework, an abstraction that provides a set of mathematical tools for describing both agent sensing capabilities and the desired deployment. A distributed cooperative control law is then formally derived finding a suboptimal solution of a cooperative differential game, where the agents are interested in achieving the requested deployment, while optimizing the resources usage according to their dynamics. The control law effectiveness is proven by theoretical arguments, and supported by numerical simulations.