The giving tree: constructing trees for efficient offline and online multi-robot coverage

Abstract

This paper discusses the problem of building efficient coverage paths for a team of robots. An efficient multi-robot coverage algorithm should result in a coverage path for every robot, such that the union of all paths generates a full coverage of the terrain and the total coverage time is minimized. A method underlying several coverage algorithms, suggests the use of spanning trees as base for creating coverage paths. However, overall performance of the coverage is heavily dependent on the given spanning tree. This paper focuses on the challenge of constructing a coverage spanning tree for both online and offline coverage that minimizes the time to complete coverage. Our general approach involves building a spanning tree by growing sub-trees from the initial location of the robots. This paper first describes a polynomial time tree-construction algorithm for offline coverage. The use of this algorithm is shown by extensive simulations to significantly improve the coverage time of the terrain even when used as a basis for a simple, inefficient, coverage algorithm. Second, this paper provides an algorithm for online coverage of a finite terrain based on spanning-trees, that is complete and guarantees linear time coverage with no redundancy in the coverage. In addition, the solutions proposed by this paper guarantee robustness to failing robots: the offline trees are used as base for robust multi-robot coverage algorithms, and the online algorithm is proven to be robust.

Multirobot Coverage Search in Three Dimensions

“…While area coverage, pursuit‐evasion, and the art gallery problem are naturally multirobot problems, our coverage search problem can be applied to a single robot or multiple robots, just as coverage planning. Multirobot coverage in two dimensions has been considered in Agmon, Hazon, and Kaminka () and Kong, Peng, and Rekleitis (). In Rekleitis, Lee‐Shue, New, and Choset (), a single robot approach for coverage planning is extended to multiple robots.…”

Multi-robot repeated area coverage

“…Although there is a wide body of literature for single coverage scenarios (Choset 2001;Agmon et al 2008a;Rekleitis et al 2008;Gabriely and Rimon 2011;Zheng et al 2005;Kurabayashi et al 1996;Batalin and Sukhatme 2002), repeated coverage has not received the same attention. Two classes of the repeated coverage problem in the literature are: 1) Area Patrolling, and 2) Boundary or Perimeter Patrolling (Open or Closed Polylines), and each is divided into:…”

Centroidal Voronoi Partitioning using Virtual Nodes for MultiRobot Coverage

“…However, a challenging problem when using a Multi-Robotic System (MRS) is to achieve distributed coordination between different robots so that they do not collide with each other or perform repeated coverage of regions within the environment. Several multi-robot coverage (MRC) strategies have been proposed in the literature [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11]. In most of these algorithms, fundamentally two strategies are followed to ensure cooperation and avoid coverage overlap.…”