Asymptotic Boundary Shrink Control with Multi-robot Systems
This addresses the challenge of scalable and practical environmental cleanup for marine spills, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing multi-robot systems with specific improvements.
The paper tackles the problem of large-scale marine spill coverage using autonomous robots by proposing an asymptotic boundary shrink control strategy that enables collective coverage with local vision sensors and avoids inter-robot collisions, validated through simulations to show convergence, spill clearance rate, and operation under limited ranges.
Harmful marine spills, such as algae blooms and oil spills, damage ecosystems and threaten public health tremendously. Hence, an effective spill coverage and removal strategy will play a significant role in environmental protection. In recent years, low-cost water surface robots have emerged as a solution, with their efficacy verified at small scale. However, practical limitations such as connectivity, scalability, and sensing and operation ranges significantly impair their large-scale use. To circumvent these limitations, we propose a novel asymptotic boundary shrink control strategy that enables collective coverage of a spill by autonomous robots featuring customized operation ranges. For each robot, a novel controller is implemented that relies only on local vision sensors with limited vision range. Moreover, the distributedness of this strategy allows any number of robots to be employed without inter-robot collisions. Finally, features of this approach including the convergence of robot motion during boundary shrink control, spill clearance rate, and the capability to work under limited ranges of vision and wireless connectivity are validated through extensive experiments with simulation.