Heterogeneous Collaborative Pursuit via Coverage Control Driven by Fokker–Planck Equations

Inspired by common features found in collaborative behaviors in nature, we investigate a general collaborative pursuit framework enabling heterogeneous multi-robot systems to adapt to dynamic environments and diverse tasks. A class of augmented Fokker-Planck equations is formulated to characterize dynamic environmental conditions, and the resulting time-varying density functions drive a novel coverage-based controller, with provable stability properties, for the participating robots to perform tasks in real time. The developed framework is decentralized and incorporates heterogeneity among different robots in task suitability, relative performance in a specific task, and safe operating regions. To demonstrate its adaptivity and effectiveness, the framework is implemented across four experimental applications ranging from multi-robot coordination to collaboration, namely forest firefighting, pursuit-evasion, monitoring of various environmental phenomena, and phoretic interactions.