Distributed Team-Based Coverage Control with Aerial Sensing and Ground Execution

In many real-world applications, such as covering a potential forest fire site, homogeneous ground robots are insufficient to respond to the fire. Moreover, when the forest is dense, the sensing capabilities of ground robots are severely limited, resulting in poor coverage. To address these challenges, this paper introduces an air-ground team-based coverage control scheme, where each team consists of one aerial robot that acts as the "eye"to assist several sensing-limited ground robots in coverage. Within this scheme, two weight settings are introduced to design diverse forms of coverage cost functions, meeting diverse needs. Based on these functions, distributed coverage control laws are developed for aerial and ground robots to achieve optimal coverage collaboratively. Simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the control laws.