A coverage algorithm for drifters in a river environment

This paper studies a coverage problem for a network of vehicles in an environment where there is an ambient flow field. This flow field can represent river currents or atmospheric air patterns that affect the vehicles' motion. Specifically, we examine the case where the flow field is always greater in magnitude than the available actuation of any individual vehicle. We define reachability sets of each agent and characterize several of their properties. These reachability sets provide a basis for dominance regions of each agent based on travel times. For the particular case of linear flows, we find a closed-form expression for these and analyze distributed gradient algorithms that optimize an area coverage metric. Finally, we present simulations illustrating the algorithm's performance and discuss lines of future research.