Voronoi Partition-based Distributed Multi-robot Coverage
Advisor Information
Prithviraj Dasgupta
Location
Milo Bail Student Center Ballroom
Presentation Type
Poster
Start Date
8-3-2013 1:00 PM
End Date
8-3-2013 4:00 PM
Abstract
Robotic coverage of an initially unknown or partially known environment is a problem that is encountered in various applications of robotic systems ranging from unmanned search and rescue, automated demining, extra-terrestrial exploration, and even domestic applications like automated lawn mowing and vacuum cleaning. It involves covering the entire surface area of a region by a group of mobile robots in the minimum possible time while avoiding repeated coverage of the same region by multiple robots. In this research, we propose a technique that divides the region to be covered by the robots into virtual sub -regions or cells using a technique called Voronoi partitioning. A potential problem of using the Voronoi partitioning technique in initially unknown environment is that adjacent Voronoi cells may not be connected because of presence of obstacles. We proposed a solution where the robots reallocate the connected patches in a distributed manner such that each robot is responsible for covering a set of contiguous connected cells. This ensures that the environment can be covered completely without any overlapping coverage. We have demonstrated the operation of our proposed technique on a simulation using e-puck robots and shown that our technique operates successfully.
Voronoi Partition-based Distributed Multi-robot Coverage
Milo Bail Student Center Ballroom
Robotic coverage of an initially unknown or partially known environment is a problem that is encountered in various applications of robotic systems ranging from unmanned search and rescue, automated demining, extra-terrestrial exploration, and even domestic applications like automated lawn mowing and vacuum cleaning. It involves covering the entire surface area of a region by a group of mobile robots in the minimum possible time while avoiding repeated coverage of the same region by multiple robots. In this research, we propose a technique that divides the region to be covered by the robots into virtual sub -regions or cells using a technique called Voronoi partitioning. A potential problem of using the Voronoi partitioning technique in initially unknown environment is that adjacent Voronoi cells may not be connected because of presence of obstacles. We proposed a solution where the robots reallocate the connected patches in a distributed manner such that each robot is responsible for covering a set of contiguous connected cells. This ensures that the environment can be covered completely without any overlapping coverage. We have demonstrated the operation of our proposed technique on a simulation using e-puck robots and shown that our technique operates successfully.