Authors: Chan Sze Kong, Ai Peng New, Ioannis Rekleitis
Abstract: In this paper, we propose an improved algorithm for the multi-robot complete coverage problem. Real world applications such as lawn mowing, chemical spill clean-up, and humanitarian de-mining can be automated by the employment of a team of autonomous mobile robots. Our approach builds on a single robot coverage algorithm, Boustrophedon decomposition. The robots are initially distributed through space and each robot is allocated a virtually bounded area to cover. The area is decomposed into cells where each cell width is fixed. The decomposed area is represented using an adjacency graph, which is incrementally constructed and shared among all the robots. Communication between the robots is available without any restrictions. Experiments on both simulated and physical hardware demonstrated the viability of employing the algorithm to perform distributed coverage of a given unknown area with multiple robots.