Heterogeneous Coverage Control with Mobility-Based Operating Regions

Abstract

This paper presents a coverage controller that allows a team of robots with qualitatively different mobility types to achieve an effective coverage over a domain consisting of multiple terrain types. In this work, each robot has specific types of terrains that it can operate on, and these compatible operating regions of a robot are determined based on its mobility type and current position. With the extended definition of coverage from sensing to servicing of events, the Voronoi cells of the robots are confined to their compatible operating regions. Based on the new Voronoi cells, the mobility constrained locational cost is defined, and a gradient descent controller is used to drive robots to locally optimal coverage positions. In order to keep each robot within its compatible regions while achieving a coverage, control barrier functions are utilized.