In this paper we consider a problem of designing control laws for multiple mobile agents trying to accomplish three objectives. One of the objectives is to sense a given compact domain while satisfying the other objective which is to avoid collisions between the agents themselves as well as with the obstacles. To keep the communication links between the agents reliable, the agents need to stay relatively close during the sensing operation which is the third and final objective. The design of control laws is based on carefully constructed objective functions and on an assumption that the agents' dynamic models are nonlinear yet affine in control laws. As an illustration of some performance characteristics of the proposed control laws, a numerical example is provided.

This paper presents theoretical and experimental results related to the control and coordination of multirobot systems interested in dynamically covering a compact domain while remaining proximal, so as to promote robust inter-robot communications, and while remaining collision free with respect to each other and static obstacles. A design for a novel, gradient-based controller using nonnegative definite objective functions and an overapproximation to the maximum function is presented. By using a multiattribute utility copula to scalarize the multiobjective control problem, a control law is presented that allows for flexible tuning of the tradeofs between objectives. This procedure mitigates the controller’s dependence on objective function parameters and allows for the straightforward integration of a novel global coverage objective. Simulation and experiments demonstrate the controller’s efectiveness in promoting scenarios with collision free trajectories, robust communications, and satisfactory coverage of the entire coverage domain concurrently for a group of differential drive robots