Persistent Coverage Control on a Sphere with Robot Safety Based on Control Barrier Functions

Abstract

This paper proposes a persistent coverage control method on a sphere, taking robot safety into account based on control barrier functions. First, we present a persistent coverage control on a sphere, which dynamically changes the arrangement of multiple robots with a limited-range sensor. Second, we also consider the safety of the robots on the sphere by using control barrier functions that guarantee energy management and collision avoidance. Furthermore, the safety-aware persistent coverage control is reduced to a quadratic programming problem using the control barrier functions, and optimization-based control law is proposed. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control method is demonstrated by simulation.