Multi-Agent Coverage Using Multiplicatively Weighted Energy Voronoi Partitions

We propose a coverage control method for energy-constrained multi-agent systems with single-integrator agent motion, in which agent energy discharges and recharges at constant rates. Differently existing methods, a Multiplicatively Weighted Energy Voronoi (MWEV) partition ensures that each agent’s coverage region varies with energy in such a way that it vanishes when energy drops to a reserve level sufficient to reach a charging station. We show that the optima of an energy-aware coverage objective are the dynamically evolving MWEV centroids. A generalized Lloyd algorithm provably drives agents with remaining battery to these centroids, and reserve-level agents to their charging stations, under a switched two-timescale model with fast motion and slow energy dynamics. Agents repeatedly pause coverage as they get depleted, and then resume coverage upon recharging. This happens arbitrarily many times, leading to an infinite-horizon coverage setting. The method works well in simulations, where we also apply an alternative technique with a different problem formulation. We contrast coverage performance and average agent downtime between the two methods; e.g., downtime is 17.70% of the experiment duration for our MWEV technique, compared to 28.5% for the alternative. In addition, the robustness of the proposed approach is investigated under nonlinear battery discharge dynamics, position errors, and delayed energy information.