Coverage Control with Multiple Ground Robots for Precision Agriculture

Abstract

In this work, coverage of agricultural fields using a team of autonomous unmanned ground robots with no human intervention is investigated. To this end, field is first represented by a topological mapandthenadistributedenergy-awaredeployment strategy is proposed to optimally distribute robots with the aim of persistent monitoring of specified regions of interest. When a robot participating in the coverage task approaches a low energy reserve, the team of robots collectively and cooperatively adjust the coverage formation to allow the agent to return to a designated base station, where it can recharge before rejoining the effort. Preliminary (simulation) results are provided to show the effectiveness and capabilities of the proposed coverage algorithm.