Distributed Air-Assisted Coverage Control for Sensing-Limited Multi-Robot Systems in Time-Varying Environment

In the multi-robot coverage control application, a group of ground robots tries to optimize the environment coverage performance. However, most of the existing works consider that the environment is static and the ground robots have large sensing ranges. In this paper, we present a fully distributed, air-assisted coverage control scheme to address the challenge of a time-varying environment and limited sensing range. Firstly, we use aerial robots equipped with low-resolution but high-sensing-range sensors to achieve a weighted Voronoi coverage of the environment. Then the aerial robots utilize their local information to guide the ground robots, equipped with low-sensing-range but high-resolution sensors, to explore the environment to optimize a high-resolution coverage performance. The ground robots adopt a new controller to promptly adapt to environmental changes. Simultaneously, each aerial robot dynamically adjusts its domain to optimize the coverage performance of the ground robots. The convergence of the control scheme is proved and its performance is evaluated through simulations.