Distributed Control for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems in Higher-Order Voronoi Coverage

This paper presents a distributed coverage control law for heterogeneous agents to achieve higher-order Voronoi coverage. Unlike most existing works, which assume that an event occurring at a certain location within the domain requires only a single homogeneous agent's response, we are motivated by applications where multiple agents of different types are required to respond to the event. In this paper, we introduce a partitioning method designed for heterogeneous agents in higher-order Voronoi coverage. Additionally, we present various forms of coverage cost functions, each tailored to meet the diverse needs of different applications. Based on these, we develop a controller that enables heterogeneous multi-agent systems to achieve equilibrium in a distributed manner. The convergence of the control law is proved and the performance is evaluated through simulations.