Decentralized Control for Self-Deploying Robotic Networks: Sweep Boundary Coverage∗∗This work was supported by the RSF 14-21-00041 and the Saint Petersburg State University.

Abstract

Several nonholonomic Dubins-car like robots travel over paths with bounded curvatures in a plane that contains an a priori unknown region. The robots are anonymous to one another and do not use communication facilities. Any of them has access to the current distance to the region and can determine the relative positions and orientations of the companion robots within a finite and given visibility range. We present a distributed navigation and guidance strategy under which every robot autonomously converges to the desired distance to the region with always respecting a given safety margin, the robots do not collide with one another, and the entire team ultimately sweeps over the respective equidistant curve at a speed exceeding a given threshold, thus forming a kind of a sweeping barrier at the perimeter of the region. Mathematically rigorous justification of the proposed strategy is offered; its effectiveness is confirmed by extensive computer simulations.