Loss of Distributed Coverage Using Lazy Agents Operating Under Discrete, Local, Event-Triggered Communication

In the context of continuous surveillance of a spatial region, this paper investigates a practically-relevant scenario where robotic sensors are introduced asynchronously and inter-robot communication is discrete, event-driven, local and asynchronous. The robots are assumed to be lazy; i.e., they seek to minimize their area of responsibility by equipartitioning the domain to be covered. We construct a non-trivial example which shows that coverage guarantees for a given algorithm might be sensitive to the number of robots and, therefore, may not scale in obvious ways. It also suggests that when such algorithms are to be verified and validated prior to field deployment, the number of robots or sensors used in test scenarios should match that deployed on the field.