Awareness Coverage Control with Uncertain Loss of Awareness

Awareness coverage control for multiple targets in a large-scale mission domain is considered in this work. Most previous results require prior knowledge of the loss of awareness to design coverage controllers to guarantee the desired state of awareness can be achieved. Other studies neglect the loss of awareness, so that the dynamics of the state of awareness can be solved and the solution can be used as feedback for coverage controllers. Uncertain loss of awareness can lead to unexpected variation in the state of awareness even when the target is covered by agents, and the control strategies to tackle the uncertain dynamics is still unclear. To eliminate the need of the knowledge and to extend to more general applications, systems with unknown loss of the awareness are considered in this paper. An overall controller composed of a nominal controller and a perturbation controller is developed. The nominal controller does not require the knowledge of the loss of awareness for implementation, and it ensures each agent is controlled to a local minimum. The perturbation controller drives the agent outside the local minimum to achieve large-scale coverage control. Stability analysis is conducted to guarantee all targets are covered with a satisfactory state of awareness, and infinite switching between the two controllers (i.e., Zeno behavior) is proven to be avoided. Finally, a numerical simulation is provided to demonstrate the performance of the developed controller.