Placement of a Team of Surveillance Vehicles Subject to Navigation Failures

Abstract

We consider the problem of performing surveillance of a region with vehicles subject to failures that prevent them from navigating through the environment. This work is based on a Voronoi coverage control problem formulation. In this formulation, failed vehicles can cause other vehicles to be trapped in a con guration that provides poor coverage of the region. To avoid this, each vehicle performs self-monitoring to detect failures. Upon detection of a failure, a negotiation mechanism is triggered and vehicles compare variations of a performance measure to decide whether when it is bene cial to help another vehicle. The proposed approach is evaluated experimentally using a eet of three wheeled mobile robots.