On Combining Multi-robot Coverage and Reciprocal Collision Avoidance

Abstract

Although robotic coverage and collision avoidance are active areas of robotics research, the avoidance of collision situations between robots has often been neglected in the context of multi-robot coverage tasks. In fact, for robots of physical size, collisions are likely to happen during deployment and coverage in densely packed multi-robot configurations. For this reason, we aim to motivate by this paper the combined use of multi-robot coverage and reciprocal collision avoidance. We present a taxonomy of collision scenarios in multi-robot coverage problems. In particular, coverage tasks with built-in heterogeneity such as multiple antagonistic objectives or robot constraints are shown to benefit from the combination. Based on our taxonomy, we evaluate four representative robotic use cases in simulation by combining the specific methods of Voronoi coverage and reciprocal velocity obstacles.

Neuro-Dominating set scheme for a fast and efficient robot deployment in internet of robotic things

“…To provide a full coverage, while maintaining the network connectivity (based on the relationship between R and r or not), many deployment algorithms can be used. These algorithms can be classified into three different categories i.e., (i ) virtual force approaches [16,17,35,36,37] (ii ) geometrical approaches [38,39,40] and (iii ) grid-based approaches [41,42,43].…”

Voronoi-based coverage control of heterogeneous disk-shaped robots

“…(Right) A collision free disk configuration does not necessarily have Voronoi cells containing respective robot bodies. approaches based on repulsive fields [9], [10] and reciprocal velocity obstacles [11] causing robots to converge to configurations far from optimal sensing configurations; or (ii) the projection of a vector field whenever a robot reaches the boundary of its partition cell [4], [12] introducing a source of discontinuity. An important observation made in [4] is that it is sufficient to restrict robot bodies to respective Voronoi regions for collision avoidance, but this is a conservative assumption for robot groups with different body sizes (as illustrated on the right in Fig.…”

Theoretical and Experimental Collaborative Area Coverage Schemes Using Mobile Agents

“…Several aspects of the area coverage problem have been studied over the years, including the effect of robot dynamics [7][8][9], communication constraints among agents [10][11][12], complex non-convex regions [13][14][15] or guaranteeing collision avoidance among the mobile robots [16,17]. A wide variety of methods has also been employed for multirobot area coverage such as geometric optimization [18], optimal control [19] or event-triggered control [20].…”