DisCoverage for non-convex environments with arbitrary obstacles

Abstract

DisCoverage is a distributed strategy for frontier-based multi-robot exploration. The robots coordinate by a partition of the environment, and choose their target points by optimizing a locally decomposable objective function. In [9] DisCoverage for convex regions was proposed. In this work, we extend DisCoverage to support arbitrary non-convex real-world environments with obstacles. Therefore, we introduce a transformation of non-convex environments to robot centric star-shaped domains. This results in a general solution with broader applications for exploration and path planning. Simulations as well as experiments with real robots demonstrate the exploration progress.