Distributed Fault Tolerant and Balanced Multi-Robot Area Partitioning for Coverage Applications

Persistent multi-robot coverage is an essential requirement in many applications, which can be achieved by decomposing a region into cells or polygons and assigning robots to cover these cells. During the operation, agents can fail, resulting in partial coverage. The faulty agent must be discovered quickly and its area must be redistributed between the rest of the working agents. However, in real world applications agents have limited communication range and hence detecting the presence of a faulty agent and redistributing the area is difficult. In this paper, we develop a distributed fault detection and area balancing algorithm using periodic communication under limited communication constraints. The approach takes agent motion uncertainty into account and develops a conflict free schedule for communication. Analysis and simulation results are presented to validate the fault tolerant capabilities of our approach.