Coverage control in multi-agent systems subject to communication delays

In this paper the problem of covering an area using a network of multi-agent systems in the presence of inter-agent communication delays induced by communication faults is investigated. A spatial partitioning technique is used based on the delayed information to divide the field among all agents. Then a motion coordination algorithm is proposed to drive agents in such a way that the coverage performance function is minimized over the regions assigned to each agent. Simulations show that the proposed approach offers improved performance compared to conventional coverage method, and that the inter-agent collision avoidance is also guaranteed.