Persistent Coverage Control for Two-wheeled Mobile Robots in Complex Geometry Environment

Abstract

A persistent coverage control problem is considered for a group of mobile robots in a complex geometry environment. The persistent coverage control is a received method for the coverage problem where the sensory range of agents is limited, and it allows robots to explore continuously along the gradient of time-varying density function. In this paper, we first focus on the persistent coverage control for the two-wheeled mobile robots assuming that the sensing region is anisotropic, and derive a control law which coordinates the rotation and the forward motion. In order to achieve coverage control in the environments with complex geometry, we propose a region assignment planning by employing Monte Carlo Tree Search for the area allocation. The proposed algorithm is demonstrated through simulations and experiments.