Reachability and Coverage Planning for Connected Agents

Unmanned autonomous vehicle assisted information gathering missions have quickly picked up interest. Indeed, the advances on drones are making this type of missions possible. Thus, we study multi-agent path planning problems, namely reachability and coverage, for such missions with a connectivity constraint. This version of the multi-agent path planning asks to generate a plan, a sequence of steps, for a group of agents that are to stay connected during the missions while satisfying the specified goal. In this paper, we study the complexity of the coverage and reachability problems for a cooperation of agents with a connectivity constraint which restrain their movement. We identify a class of topological graphs which allows one to reduce the complexity of the decision problems from PSPACE-complete to LOGSPACE. We show, on the other hand, that the bounded versions of the previous problems are NP-complete.