Robot coverage of terrain with non-uniform traversability

Abstract

In this paper, we study how multiple robots can cover known terrain quickly. We extend Multi-Robot Forest Coverage, a state-of-the-art multi-robot coverage algorithm, from terrain with uniform traversability to terrain with nonuniform traversability, which is nontrivial. We prove that its cover times are at most about sixteen times larger than minimal and demonstrate experimentally that they are significantly smaller than those of an alternative multi-robot coverage algorithm.