Stable multi-particle systems and application in multi-vehicle path planning and coverage

We present a path planning algorithm for cooperative coverage using a set of nonholonomic autonomous vehicles. The paper describes our overall framework and algorithm for the computation of trajectories that maximize spatio-temporal coverage while satisfying hard constraints such as collision avoidance and specifications on initial and final positions. Our approach is based on approximation of the trajectories of vehicles using sequence of way points and treating each way point as a moving particle in the space. We defines interaction forces between the particles such that the resulting multi-particle system will be stable, moreover, the trajectories generated by the way points in the equilibria of the multi- particle system will satisfy all of the hard constraint while generating a suboptimal solution to the coverage problem.