DisCoverage: From Coverage to Distributed Multi-Robot Exploration

Abstract

DisCoverage transfers the well-known solution to the coverage problem to the exploration problem. Essentially, DisCoverage solves the multi-robot exploration problem through a spatially distributed optimization problem. Our contribution is a new objective function for DisCoverage based on the centroidal search. Each robot continuously creates and optimizes the proposed objective function, obtaining a gradient-based control law that leads into unexplored regions. A proof of convergence is given as well as a simulation and a statistical evaluation demonstrating DisCoverage.