Decentralized redistribution for cooperative patrol

This paper addresses the problem of enabling a group of autonomous vehicles to effectively patrol an environment significantly larger than their communication and sensing radii. Our formulation uses an a priori spatial decomposition of the environment into smaller areas in order to provide a framework for the allocation of vehicles to different parts of the environment. We develop a distributed cooperative control algorithm that transfers vehicles between these areas based on only local information and prove that it achieves the proper environment-wide distribution of vehicles within a finite time interval. Various applications are discussed and simulations are included to illustrate convergence dynamics as well as to quantify practical performance as a function of problem parameters. Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.