  Future applications in environmental monitoring, delivery of services and
transportation of goods motivate the study of deployment and partitioning tasks
for groups of autonomous mobile agents. These tasks are achieved by recent
coverage algorithms, based upon the classic methods by Lloyd. These algorithms
however rely upon critical requirements on the communication network:
information is exchanged synchronously among all agents and long-range
communication is sometimes required. This work proposes novel coverage
algorithms that require only gossip communication, i.e., asynchronous,
pairwise, and possibly unreliable communication. Which robot pair communicates
at any given time may be selected deterministically or randomly. A key
innovative idea is describing coverage algorithms for robot deployment and
environment partitioning as dynamical systems on a space of partitions. In
other words, we study the evolution of the regions assigned to each agent
rather than the evolution of the agents' positions. The proposed gossip
algorithms are shown to converge to centroidal Voronoi partitions under mild
technical conditions.
