Collaborative Navigation-Aware Coverage in Feature-Poor Environments

Abstract

Multi agent coverage and robot navigation are two very important research fields within robotics. However, their intersection has received limited attention. In multi agent coverage, perfect navigation is often assumed, and in robot navigation, the focus is often to minimize the localization error with the aid of stationary features from the environment. The need for integration of the two becomes clear in environments with very sparse features or landmarks, for example when a group of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are to search a uniform seafloor for mines or other dangerous objects. In such environments, localization systems are often deprived of detectable features to use that could increase their accuracy. In this paper we propose an algorithm for doing navigation aware multi agent coverage in areas with no landmarks. Instead of using identical lawn mower patterns, we propose to mirror every other pattern to enable the agents to meet up and make inter-agent measurements and share information regularly. This improves performance in two ways, global drift in relation to the area to be covered is reduced, and local coverage gaps between adjacent patterns are reduced. Further, we show that this can be accomplished within the constraints of very limited sensing, computing and communication resources that most AUVs have available. The effectiveness of our method is shown through statistically significant simulated experiments.