Sonia Martínez
Jacobs Faculty Scholar
Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Deployment of drifters in a piecewise constant flow environment
Andrew Kwok and Sonia MartÃnez
Proceedings of the 49th IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control, Atlanta, GA, December 2010
Abstract:
We study a deployment strategy for a group of vehicles that drift in an ambient flow field. Specifically, we address the case where the flow is always greater in magnitude than an individual vehicle's speed, thus individual agents are not able to maintain constant positions. For analytic tractability, we make the assumption that the flow can be approximated as a piecewise constant vector field over polygonal regions. This results in interesting phenomena regarding minimum-time optimal solutions at the interface between two different constant flows. We characterize these optimal trajectories and then specify an area maximizing cooperative coverage algorithm that agents in the flow can implement in a distributed manner.
File: main.pdf
Bib-tex entry:
@InProceedings{AK-SM:10-cdc,
author = {A. Kwok and S. Mart{\'\i}nez},
booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control},
title = {Deployment of drifters in a piecewise constant flow environment},
year = {2010},
month = {December},
address = {Atlanta, GA, USA},
pages = {6584--6589}
}