In this paper, we present a distributed algorithm for cloud-supported effective coverage of 3D structures with a network of sensing agents. The structure to inspect is abstracted into a set of landmarks, where each landmark represents a point or small area of interest, and incorporates information about position and orientation. The agents navigate the environment following the proposed control algorithm until all landmarks have reached a satisfactory level of coverage. The agents do not communicate with each other directly, but exchange data through a shared cloud repository which is accessed asynchronously and intermittently. We show formally that, under the proposed control architecture, the networked agents complete the coverage mission in finite time. The results are corroborated by simulations in ROS, and experimental evaluation is in progress.
QC 20190124