Pivot-based Collective Coverage Control with a Multi-robot Team

Abstract

This paper presents a novel collective coverage control strategy for robots to achieve effective coverage over a large-scale spill. The proposed idea is based on the divide and conquer approach that partitions a large irregular spill in the workspace into a number of smaller zones and let the robot team cover each packing zone sequentially. Ultimately, the robot team can cover the entire area. For an effective coverage operation in diverse and dynamic environments, we propose a pivot-based control strategy performed by a pivot robot and multiple planet robots. The pivot robot is located at the center of the area to be covered and serves as a lighthouse to all the working robots denoted as planet robots exploring the area. By doing so, the planet robots do not require a global coordinate system nor massive communication between robots for their coordination, ultimately enabling an efficient, adaptive, scalable, and fault tolerant coverage operation. The proposed strategy is validated through extensive simulation experiments with different packing shapes and different numbers of robots.