Multi-Robot Control Using Time-Varying Density Functions
This work addresses multi-robot coordination for applications like surveillance or environmental monitoring, but it is incremental as it extends prior coverage algorithms to explicitly handle time-varying densities.
The paper tackles the problem of controlling a multi-robot team using time-varying density functions as rough references for robot placement, proposing a continuous-time algorithm for optimal coverage that accounts for these dynamics and a distributed approximation, with simulations and experiments confirming the desired behaviors.
This paper presents an approach to externally influencing a team of robots by means of time-varying density functions. These density functions represent rough references for where the robots should be located. To this end, a continuous-time algorithm is proposed that moves the robots so as to provide optimal coverage given the density functions as they evolve over time. The developed algorithm represents an extension to previous coverage algorithms in that time-varying densities are explicitly taken into account in a provable manner. A distributed approximation to this algorithm is moreover proposed whereby the robots only need to access information from adjacent robots. Simulations and robotic experiments show that the proposed algorithms do indeed exhibit the desired behaviors in practice as well as in theory.