Heterogeneous Coverage and Multi-Resource Allocation in Supply-Constrained Teams

Abstract

We consider a team of heterogeneous robots, each equipped with various types and quantities of resources, and tasked with supplying these resources to multiple areas of demand. We propose a Voronoi-based coverage control approach to deploy robots to areas of demand by defining a position- and time-varying density function to represent the quality at which demand is being met in the environment. This approach allows robots to prioritize the various demand locations in a continuous, distributed fashion. We present analyses to show that our controls drive the robots to critical points in the environment, along with simulations and hardware-in-the-loop experiments to demonstrate our approach.