Health-Aware Coverage Control With Application to a Team of Small UAVs

This paper studies the problem of controlling a team of vehicles in order to cover a region with their onboard sensors. The goal is to perform such a coverage task when the capability of the vehicles to carry out the task varies through time. We consider variable sensing performance and the loss of vehicles. Algorithms are proposed to enable coverage despite such variable health conditions. These algorithms are validated through experiments with quad-rotor unmanned air vehicles. Since these algorithms require communication among the vehicles, simulations are carried out to show that the proposed algorithms degrade nicely when perfect communication is not possible.