Distributed Event- and Self-Triggered Coverage Control with Speed Constrained Unicycle Robots
This work addresses energy-efficient coverage control for battery-constrained UAV fleets, presenting an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackled the problem of multi-robot coverage control for unicycle-model UAVs with constant forward-speed constraints, developing event- and self-triggered algorithms to reduce communication and control resource usage, with hardware experiments validating the theoretical results.
Voronoi coverage control is a particular problem of importance in the area of multi-robot systems, which considers a network of multiple autonomous robots, tasked with optimally covering a large area. This is a common task for fleets of fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), which are described in this work by a unicycle model with constant forward-speed constraints. We develop event-based control/communication algorithms to relax the resource requirements on wireless communication and control actuators, an important feature for battery-driven or otherwise energy-constrained systems. To overcome the drawback that the event-triggered algorithm requires continuous measurement of system states, we propose a self-triggered algorithm to estimate the next triggering time. Hardware experiments illustrate the theoretical results.