Coverage control of multiple heterogeneous mobile robots with nonholonomic constraints

Abstract

This paper focuses on the coverage control of a group of heterogeneous mobile robots with nonholonomic constraints. The robots are subject to kinematic characteristic of pure-rolling, no-slip constraints. A network of mobile robots shall converge to the centroid of their Voronoi regions to get a final optimal sensing configuration. This shall be accomplished with a decentralized coverage control law. For an unknown environment, a parameter adaptive law is used for estimating the centroid of Voronoi cells. The parameters of the robots are unified using a consensus algorithm. We consider different types of driving mechanism such as differential drive and car-like robots, such that the method provided in this paper can be applied to a group of heterogeneous mobile robots. At the end of this paper, simulative results verify effectiveness of the improved distributed coverage algorithm.