Distributed area coverage control with imprecise robot localization: Simulation and experimental studies

Abstract

This article examines the static area coverage problem by a network of mobile, sensor-equipped agents with imprecise localization. Each agent has uniform radial sensing ability and is governed by first-order kinodynamics. To partition the region of interest, a novel partitioning scheme, the Additively Weighted Guaranteed Voronoi diagram is introduced which takes into account both the agents’ positioning uncertainty and their heterogeneous sensing performance. Each agent’s region of responsibility corresponds to its Additively Weighted Guaranteed Voronoi cell, bounded by hyperbolic arcs. An appropriate gradient ascent-based control scheme is derived so that it guarantees monotonic increase of a coverage objective and is extended with collision avoidance properties. Additionally, a computationally efficient simplified control scheme is offered that is able to achieve comparable performance. Several simulation studies are offered to evaluate the performance of the two control schemes. Finally, two experiments using small differential drive-like robots and an ultra-wideband positioning system were conducted, highlighting the performance of the proposed control scheme in a real world scenario.