Voronoi-Based Coverage Control of Heterogeneous Disk-Shaped Robots
This work addresses coverage control for heterogeneous robots in mobile sensing applications, representing an incremental improvement with practical extensions.
The paper tackled the problem of distributed mobile sensing with heterogeneous robots by developing a Voronoi-based coverage control method that ensures sensory coverage and collision avoidance, achieving convergence and collision guarantees with practical extensions for differential drive kinematics.
In distributed mobile sensing applications, networks of agents that are heterogeneous respecting both actuation as well as body and sensory footprint are often modelled by recourse to power diagrams --- generalized Voronoi diagrams with additive weights. In this paper we adapt the body power diagram to introduce its "free subdiagram," generating a vector field planner that solves the combined sensory coverage and collision avoidance problem via continuous evaluation of an associated constrained optimization problem. We propose practical extensions (a heuristic congestion manager that speeds convergence and a lift of the point particle controller to the more practical differential drive kinematics) that maintain the convergence and collision guarantees.