Decentralized Coverage Control for Multi-Agent Systems with Nonlinear Dynamics

Abstract

SUMMARYIn this paper, we study the decentralized coverage control problem for an environment using a group of autonomous mobile robots with nonholonomic kinematic and dynamic constraints. In comparison with standard coverage control procedures, we develop a combined controller for Voronoi-based coverage approach in which kinematic and dynamic constraints of the actual mobile sensing robots are incorporated into the controller design. Furthermore, a collision avoidance component is added in the kinematic controller in order to guarantee a collision free coverage of the area. The convergence of the network to the optimal sensing configuration is proven with a Lyapunov-type analysis. Numerical simulations are provided approving the effectiveness of the proposed method through several experimental scenarios.

On Combining Multi-robot Coverage and Reciprocal Collision Avoidance

“…If we apply Voronoi coverage control in an outer loop at high level, the preferred velocities v pref i after (2) serve as inputs to the inner control loop given by the ORCA method in (6). This is the implementation we will use throughout Section 4.…”

“…In the constrained case (Voronoi coverage combined with RVO), a team of cooperatively covering holonomic robots with intragroup collision avoidance converges but stays off the centroids c V i by (r i + r j )/2 in the worst case. A team of cooperatively covering non-holonomic robots converges after [3,6] whenever the robots move closer to the centroids in each control step (in particular, this requires bidirectional driveability of the robots). Intergroup collision avoidance among non-cooperative robots or teams, however, can introduce arbitrary perturbances, such that final convergence is not guaranteed.…”

“…In this section, we finally apply the combined Voronoi coverage and reciprocal collision avoidance methods from Section 3 in simulation 6 , and evaluate the collision scenarios from Section 2 for four representative robotic use cases.…”

“…In the context of Voronoi coverage, robot-to-robot collision avoidance for robots of physical size (i.e., finite size instead of zero-sized point robots) has previously been considered by [5,6]. The method in [5] restricts the robots' positions to the collision-free subareas in the interiors of their Voronoi cells; the Voronoi coverage controller in [6] adds a collision avoidance component based on repulsive terms to the coverage control law.…”

“…The method in [5] restricts the robots' positions to the collision-free subareas in the interiors of their Voronoi cells; the Voronoi coverage controller in [6] adds a collision avoidance component based on repulsive terms to the coverage control law. Both methods, however, focus on one collision scenario only, which addresses the collision avoidance among robots that all share one single objective and execute the same Voronoi coverage control law cooperatively.…”