A hybrid model predictive control scheme for containment and distributed sensing in multi-agent systems

This paper proposes a control scheme for distributed sensing using a leader/follower multi-agent architecture. The control objective is to make a group of mobile agents cover and sense a sequence of regions of interest. More specifically, when the leaders reach a new target region, they stop until the followers have performed a sensing task. Furthermore, the followers must be contained inside the convex-hull of the leaders’ positions during the motion. Key features of our method, that combines hybrid control with Model Predictive Control (MPC) techniques, are the possibility to take into account input constraints in order to plan the sensing maneuver and the ability of the followers to detect containment violations by simple computation based on the available information about the leaders’ positions.