Range Limited Coverage Control using Air-Ground Multi-Robot Teams

In this paper, we investigate how heterogeneous multi-robot systems with different sensing capabilities can observe a domain with an a priori unknown density function. Common coverage control techniques are targeted towards homogeneous teams of robots and do not consider what happens when the sensing capabilities of the robots are vastly different. This work proposes an extension to Lloyd’s algorithm that fuses coverage information from heterogeneous robots with differing sensing capabilities to effectively observe a domain. Namely, we study a bimodal team of robots consisting of aerial and ground agents. In our problem formulation we use aerial robots with coarse domain sensors to approximate the number of ground robots needed within their sensing region to effectively cover it. This information is relayed to ground robots, who perform an extension to Lloyd’s algorithm that balances a locally focused coverage controller with a globally focused distribution controller. The stability of the Lloyd’s algorithm extension is proven and its performance is evaluated through simulation and experiments using the Robotarium, a remotely-accessible, multi-robot testbed.