A Convergent Solution to the Multi-vehicle Coverage Problem

The paper presents a new solution to the multi-vehicle coverage problem. The proposed algorithm guarantees complete coverage and provides collaborative behaviors of vehicles, despite the fact that it does not explicitly exploit any computationally intensive optimization technique. The algorithm can deal with any mission domain, including regions with irregular shapes, multi-connected and disjoint regions. It gives reasonably good solutions even for partially connected multi-vehicle systems. The coverage problem for regions the shape of which change in time regardless the vehicle movement is also solved by the proposed algorithm.