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arXiv · 1008.4941

Pairwise Optimal Discrete Coverage Control for Gossiping Robots

Joseph W. Durham·Ruggero Carli·Francesco Bullo
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Abstract

We propose distributed algorithms to automatically deploy a group of robotic agents and provide coverage of a discretized environment represented by a graph. The classic Lloyd approach to coverage optimization involves separate centering and partitioning steps and converges to the set of centroidal Voronoi partitions. In this work we present a novel graph coverage algorithm which achieves better performance without this separation while requiring only pairwise ``gossip'' communication between agents. Our new algorithm provably converges to an element of the set of pairwise-optimal partitions, a subset of the set of centroidal Voronoi partitions. We illustrate that this new equilibrium set represents a significant performance improvement through numerical comparisons to existing Lloyd-type methods. Finally, we discuss ways to efficiently do the necessary computations.

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Joseph W. Durham, Ruggero Carli, Francesco Bullo. 2010-08-29. Pairwise Optimal Discrete Coverage Control for Gossiping Robots. https://arxiv.org/abs/1008.4941

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