Coverage control in multi-vehicle systems subject to health degradation

This paper presents a distributed deployment algorithm for a network of multi-vehicle systems to minimize a prescribed cost function. The goal is to perform a coverage task when the capability of the vehicles to carry out the task varies through time. The problem is investigated for the case where vehicles have variable sensing performance. A specific partitioning technique is used to address this problem, and optimal configuration for vehicles is also introduced. A distributed coverage control is then provided which guarantees the convergence of vehicles to the best configuration subject to health degradation due to faults in individual vehicle of the team. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated by numerical simulations.