Autonomous Coverage Expansion of Mobile Agents via Cooperative Control and Cooperative Communication

In this paper, a distributed extremum seeking and cooperative control is designed for mobile agents to disperse themselves optimally in maintaining communication quality and maximizing their coverage. The agents locally form a virtual MIMO communication system, and they communicate among them by using the decode and forward cooperative communication. Outage probability is used as a measure of communication quality which can be estimated real-time. A general performance index balancing outage probability and spatial dispersion is chosen for the overall system. Extremum seeking control approach is used to estimate the optimal values specified by the performance index, and cooperative formation control is applied to move the agents to the optimal locations by using only the locally-available information. The network connectivity and coverage are much improved when compared to either non-cooperative communication approaches or other existing control results. Simulation analysis is carried out to demonstrate the performance and robustness of the proposal methodology, and simulation is done to illustrate its effectiveness.