Cooperative Hierarchical Coverage Control of Multiagent Systems With Nonholonomic Constraints in Poriferous Environments

It has long posed a challenging task to optimally deploy multiagent systems (MASs) to cooperatively coverage poriferous environments in real cooperative detection applications. In response to this challenge, this article proposes a hierarchical coverage control (HCC) protocol for MASs to perform sector-based coverage operations. First, a distributed Voronoi partition-based sweep-and-assign protocol, combined with a sectorial partition method, is developed, enabling the segmentation of a whole poriferous region into multiple sectorial sub-subregions. Following this procedure, an extreme search scheme is developed to determine the optimal amount of agents for each subregion. After this allocation, a distributed controller is proposed to deploy the agents, considering nonholonomic constraints, into designated niche positions. In addition, sufficient conditions are derived to guarantee the asymptotical stability of the present HCC. The analytical challenge of the present study stems from the nonconvex characteristics inherent in the loss function induced by porous environments. This nonconvexity renders the task of globally optimizing the assignment of MASs intractable. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the present coverage control approach.