Distributed Coverage Control for Air–Ground Robot Systems With Heterogeneous Sensing Capabilities

In multi-robot coverage control, ground robots aim to cover and monitor a domain optimally. However, when covering an extensive domain like a densely forested potential fire site, the sensing capabilities of ground robots are limited, resulting in poor coverage. Leveraging the aerial robots’ ability to expand sensing ranges through high-altitude flight, this paper proposes a fully distributed, air-ground coverage control scheme to address this challenge. First, aerial robots provide a low-resolution coverage of the domain. Then, they use coarse but broad sensing information to guide ground robots, with short-range but high-resolution sensing, to achieve a high-resolution coverage. Simultaneously, each aerial robot dynamically adjusts its cell size to match its load, enhancing the coverage performance. The convergence of the control scheme is proved and its performance is evaluated through simulations and experiments.