Robust Online Multi-robot Simultaneous Exploration and Coverage Path Planning

Abstract

In this paper, a robust online Multi-robot Simultaneous exploration and coveragepath planning problem is presented. The entire workspace is initially partitionedusing the Manhattan Voronoi partitioning method, and the robots execute Multi-Robot Simultaneous Exploration and Coverage (MRSimExCoverage) using theSpanning Tree Coverage (STC) algorithm and cover the workspace. Once the robot(s) failure is detected the uncovered portions of the Voronoi cell of the failedrobot will be shared between other eligible robots or a replacement strategy,ifavailable, is performed. Simulation experiments within the V-rep environment isused to demonstrate and validate the performance of the proposed algorithm.Though the authors used the STC algorithm for path planning for the purposeof demonstration, any suitable coverage algorithm may be used.