Safe spherical coverage control for multi-agent systems with obstacle avoidance

Liu, Wenbin, Borikarnphanichphaisal, Kritapas, Tafrishi, Seyed Amir ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9829-3144 and Svinin, Mikhail 2026. Safe spherical coverage control for multi-agent systems with obstacle avoidance. Electronics 15 (16) , 3602. 10.3390/electronics15163602

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Abstract

This paper addresses safe coverage control for multi-agent systems on a spherical surface with obstacles. While centroidal Voronoi tessellation has been widely used for distributed coverage generation, its extension to spherical environments with safety constraints remains relatively underexplored. To address this problem, we propose a spherical coverage control framework that integrates spherical centroidal Voronoi tessellation with control barrier functions. The proposed method assigns coverage objectives through spherical Voronoi partitioning and corresponding centroid computation, while safety is enforced through barrier-based constraints that prevent inter-agent collisions and obstacle collisions during motion. In addition, a surface-retention mechanism is incorporated to mitigate agent drift away from the desired spherical surface. The method is examined in a Python-based simulation environment with multiple obstacle layouts. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework enables safe distributed coverage over a spherical surface and that the surface-retention mechanism improves conformity of the agent trajectories to the target spherical manifold. The proposed approach provides a practical basis for safe multi-agent deployment in spherical environments.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Engineering
Publisher:	MDPI
ISSN:	2079-9292
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	19 August 2026
Date of Acceptance:	11 August 2026
Last Modified:	19 Aug 2026 11:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/189087

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