Distributed Coordination Strategies for Wide-Area Patrol

This paper addresses the problem of enabling a group of autonomous vehicles to effectively patrol an environment significantly larger than their communication and sensing radii. The environment is divided into smaller areas and special coordinator vehicles are designated to control the transfer of the other vehicles from one area to another. Our past work showed that by organizing the areas and coordinators into a ring topology, we could design a control algorithm that globally balanced the number of vehicles in all areas within a bounded length of time. This paper extends those results to a much broader class of area-coordinator topologies and this added flexibility can be used in implementation to reduce the time it takes to attain the globally balanced state.