Coverage Control for Wire-Traversing Robots

Abstract

In this paper we consider the coverage control problem for a team of wire-traversing robots. The twodimensional motion of robots moving in a planar environment has to be projected to one-dimensional manifolds representing the wires. Starting from Lloyd's descent algorithm for coverage control, a solution that generates continuous motion of the robots on the wires is proposed. This is realized by means of a Continuous Onto Wires (COW) map: the robots' workspace is mapped onto the wires on which the motion of the robots is constrained to be. A final projection step is introduced to ensure that the configuration of the robots on the wires is a local minimizer of the constrained locational cost. An algorithm for the continuous constrained coverage control problem is proposed and it is tested both in simulation and on a team of mobile robots.

A Conformal Mapping-based Framework for Robot-to-Robot and Sim-to-Real Transfer Learning

“…To the best of our knowledge, the SCM method proposed in this paper is rarely used in the robotics field. In [16], the SCM is leveraged to map the planar motion to the continuous linear motion to solve a coverage control problem for wiretraversing robots. Comparing to the existing works, this paper proposes a light-weight transfer learning framework which does not rely on massive data collection.…”