A Monitoring Strategy of Multi-Robot Systems in Dynamic Environments: Coverage Control and Density Estimation

A critical task in environmental monitoring is the reconstruction of the density function of an event over the mission region. In such tasks, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are employed as spatially distributed mobile sensing agents. In this paper, we consider the cooperative coverage problem for a group of UAVs in the mission region with a time-varying density function. The density function is modeled by a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) with unknown parameters. By resorting to a consensus-based Expectation-Maximization (EM) approach, the GMM parameters are estimated based on the local observations of UAVs. Finally, the proposed strategy is applied to an offshore oil spill monitoring mission. The simulation results verify the theoretical results and demonstrate the competence of the proposed strategy for such applications.