Distributed Coordination of Wheeled Mobile Robots for Unknown Moving Targets Interception

This paper investigates distributed coordination of a team of wheeled mobile robots for multiple moving targets interception over a convex domain. In order to successfully intercept potential intruders entering the mission domain from different orientations, mobile robots are dynamically deployed to monitor the whole area and track moving targets once they are detected at a certain location. Due to the lack of knowledge about the numbers and online dynamic models of targets, a time-varying priority function indicating the most probable area where these targets may appear is introduced to increase the chance of intercepting them. Meanwhile, a target switching mechanism is employed to decide when targets should be considered by each mobile robot for interception task. Based on this priority function, a novel distributed coverage control law is designed to guarantee that wheeled mobile robots asymptotically converge to their generalized Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation and minimize the cost function with respect to those moving targets. Simulation results are given to present the advantage of the proposed approach over traditional coverage control strategy.