Optimal Configurations in Coverage Control with Polynomial Costs

We revisit the static coverage control problem for placement of vehicles with simple motion on the real line, under the assumption that the cost is a polynomial function of the locations of the vehicles. The main contribution of this paper is to demonstrate the use of tools from numerical algebraic geometry, in particular, a numerical polynomial homotopy continuation method that guarantees to find all solutions of polynomial equations, in order to characterize the global minima for the coverage control problem. The results are then compared against a classic distributed approach involving the use of Lloyd descent, which is known to converge only to a local minimum under certain technical conditions.