A New Coordinated Control Strategy of Multi-Agent System for Pollution Neutralization

In this paper, the coordination control of a group of mobile agents equipped with omnidirectional spraying devices for pollution neutralization in a bounded area is studied. In order to effectively remove the toxic pollutants, a large number of cheap static sensors are deployed in the task area in advance to measure and reconstruct the concentration distribution of pollutants in real-time. Once the pollutant is detected, the agent will immediately clean up the pollutant. On the premise that the control strategy of the neutralizing agent spraying device is known in advance, this paper proposes a novel objective function to be optimized, which can represent the average spraying effect of the multi-agent system in the whole task area. In order to maximize the objective function, a coordinated control algorithm based on the distributed gradient is designed to drive the multi-agent system to asymptotically converge to the generalized center of mass in their respective Voronoi cells. Finally, this paper presents a group of simulation examples of tracking and clearing multiple pollution sources in the convex polygon area by a group of mobile agents.