Fault tolerant area coverage control for multiagent systems

Abstract

The fault tolerance characteristics of a distributed multi-agent coverage algorithm are examined. A team of sensor-equipped mobile agents is tasked with covering a planar region of interest. A distributed, gradient-based control scheme is utilized for this purpose. The agents are assumed to consist of three subsystems, each one of which may fail. The subsystems under examination are the actuation, sensing and the communication subsystem. Partial and catastrophic faults are examined. Several simulation studies are conducted highlighting the robustness of the distributed nature of the control scheme to these classes of faults, even when several of them happen at the same time.