2009/03/21 by Francesco Bullo, Bullo, Francesco, Ruggero Carli +3 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Medicine · #Distributed Control Multi-Agent Systems #FOS: Mathematics #Mathematical and Theoretical Epidemiology and Ecology Models #Mobile Ad Hoc Networks #Optimization and Control (math.OC)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0903.3642
openalex publication_date 2009/03/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Future applications in environmental monitoring, delivery of services and transportation of goods motivate the study of deployment and partitioning tasks for groups of autonomous mobile agents. These tasks are achieved by recent coverage algorithms, based upon the classic methods by Lloyd. These algorithms however rely upon critical requirements on the communication network: information is exchanged synchronously among all agents and long-range communication is sometimes required. This work proposes novel coverage algorithms that require only gossip communication, i.e., asynchronous, pairwise, and possibly unreliable communication. Which robot pair communicates at any given time may be selected deterministically or randomly. A key innovative idea is describing coverage algorithms for robot deployment and environment partitioning as dynamical systems on a space of partitions. In other words, we study the evolution of the regions assigned to each agent rather than the evolution of the agents' positions. The proposed gossip algorithms are shown to converge to centroidal Voronoi partitions under mild technical conditions.