A Fully Distributed, Air-Ground Coordinated Coverage Control for Multi-Robot Systems with Limited Sensing Range

Abstract

This paper presents a fully distributed coverage control scheme to address the challenge of limited sensing range in multi-robot systems. Unlike most existing methods that employ homogeneous robot teams, which exhibit sensitivity to sensing ranges in their coverage performance, our proposed method uses heterogeneous robot teams. We use aerial robots equipped with low-resolution but high-range sensors to gain rough features of the entire area first. Then aerial robots communicate with their neighbors, using local information to guide ground robots equipped with low-range but high-resolution sensors, thereby achieving local, fine-grained cov-erage. Moreover, each aerial robot dynamically adjusts its domains based on the final number of ground robots under its dominance, optimizing the coverage performance of each ground robot. The convergence of the method is proved and its performance is evaluated through simulations.