Safe Coverage of Moving Domains for Vehicles With Second-Order Dynamics

Autonomous coverage of a specified area by robots operating in close proximity with each other has many potential applications such as real-time monitoring rapidly changing environments, and search rescue; however, coordination safety are two fundamental challenges. For coordination, we propose distributed controller for covering moving, compact domains which consists double integrator bounded input forces. This control policy is based on artificial potentials alignment forces designed to promote desired vehicle-domain intervehicle separations relative velocities. We prove that certain configurations locally asymptotically stable. safety, establish energy conditions collision-free motion utilize Hamilton–Jacobi (HJ) reachability theory last-resort pairwise collision avoidance. derive an analytical solution the associated HJ partial differential equation corresponding avoidance problem between vehicles. demonstrate our approach several numerical simulations involving vehicles convex nonconvex moving domains.