TY - GEN
T1 - Coverage and field estimation on bounded domains by diffusive swarms
AU - Elamvazhuthi, Karthik
AU - Adams, Chase
AU - Berman, Spring
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 IEEE.
PY - 2016/12/27
Y1 - 2016/12/27
N2 - In this paper, we consider stochastic coverage of bounded domains by a diffusing swarm of robots that take local measurements of an underlying scalar field. We introduce three control methodologies with diffusion, advection, and reaction as independent control inputs. We analyze the diffusion-based control strategy using standard operator semigroup-theoretic arguments. We show that the diffusion coefficient can be chosen to be dependent only on the robots' local measurements to ensure that the swarm density converges to a function proportional to the scalar field. The boundedness of the domain precludes the need to impose assumptions on decaying properties of the scalar field at infinity. Moreover, exponential convergence of the swarm density to the equilibrium follows from properties of the spectrum of the semigroup generator. In addition, we use the proposed coverage method to construct a time-inhomogenous diffusion process and apply the observability of the heat equation to reconstruct the scalar field over the entire domain from observations of the robots' random motion over a small subset of the domain. We verify our results through simulations of the coverage scenario on a 2D domain and the field estimation scenario on a 1D domain.
AB - In this paper, we consider stochastic coverage of bounded domains by a diffusing swarm of robots that take local measurements of an underlying scalar field. We introduce three control methodologies with diffusion, advection, and reaction as independent control inputs. We analyze the diffusion-based control strategy using standard operator semigroup-theoretic arguments. We show that the diffusion coefficient can be chosen to be dependent only on the robots' local measurements to ensure that the swarm density converges to a function proportional to the scalar field. The boundedness of the domain precludes the need to impose assumptions on decaying properties of the scalar field at infinity. Moreover, exponential convergence of the swarm density to the equilibrium follows from properties of the spectrum of the semigroup generator. In addition, we use the proposed coverage method to construct a time-inhomogenous diffusion process and apply the observability of the heat equation to reconstruct the scalar field over the entire domain from observations of the robots' random motion over a small subset of the domain. We verify our results through simulations of the coverage scenario on a 2D domain and the field estimation scenario on a 1D domain.
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U2 - 10.1109/CDC.2016.7798696
DO - 10.1109/CDC.2016.7798696
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85010747961
T3 - 2016 IEEE 55th Conference on Decision and Control, CDC 2016
SP - 2867
EP - 2874
BT - 2016 IEEE 55th Conference on Decision and Control, CDC 2016
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 55th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, CDC 2016
Y2 - 12 December 2016 through 14 December 2016
ER -