A practical approach to coverage control for multiple mobile robots with a circular sensing range

Abstract

This paper presents a practical approach to coverage planning with multiple circular mobile sensors. Our approach provides a scalable solution with respect to distance, sensor's range, time, and nonholonomic constraints. In addition to achieving complete and near optimal coverage, our approach also autonomously controls each mobile robot to avoid all moving and stationary obstacles. Our solution relies on the Art Gallery Problem's (AGP) concept and Traveling Salesman Problem's (TSP) concept which are NP-hard. Our approach follows six steps. First, given an arbitrary number of statically circular objects, apply the Delaunay Triangulation Method on the objects. Second, apply the Circular Waypoint Coverage Placement algorithm, based on the sensing range, to find the Cartesian coordinate of waypoint required for each face. Third, apply the traveling salesman algorithm to find the desirable tour. Fourth, apply the Novel Previous-Next Waypoints Coverage Constraint (PNWCC) algorithm to reduce the distance and angle among all waypoints in the tour, while maintaining complete coverage. Each and every waypoint may move to a different position or delete as a result of this step. Fifth, apply a cubic Spline algorithm to smooth the tour. Sixth, apply the Trajectory Planning Technique to steer the mobile robots from the given desired initial position and orientation to the desired final position and orientation collision-free and on time.