Coverage Control Of Multiple Heterogeneous Mobile Robots With Nonholonomic Constraints

With continuous development of robot’s practical application, multi-robot collaboration has attracted more and more researchers’ attention. Nowadays, it has become a new research hotspot in the fields of computer application and electrical engineering. Compared with single robot, multi-robot system has irreplaceable advantages in many aspects, such as task execution efficiency and flexibility, environmental information detection, as well as strong adaptability and fault tolerance in the complex task environment. As an important part of multi-robot research, coverage control of multiple robots has made significant progress in recent years. And its relevant applications have expanded to many areas, such as environmental and industrial equipment monitoring, disaster relief, multi-target tracking and military intelligence acquisition.This paper focuses on the coverage control of a group of heterogeneous mobile robots with nonholonomic constraints. The robots are subject to kinematic characteristic of pure-rolling, no-slip constraints. A network of mobile robots shall converge to the centroid of their Voronoi regions to get a final optimal sensing configuration. This shall be accomplished with a decentralized coverage control law. In the process of moving, the mobile robots detect and sense the environmental information using the sensors and adjust the target states in real time according to the distribution of the environmental information. For an unknown environment, a parameter adaptive law is used for estimating the centroid of Voronoi cells. Meanwhile, a consensus algorithm is used to guarantee that the environment parameters sensing by each robot can achieve consistency rapidly. In the process of robot moving, different kinematic characteristics of mobile robots are considered, such that the method provided in this paper can be applied to coverage control of a group of heterogeneous mobile robots. And this also gives the abstract classical coverage algorithm a richer content and more intuitive significance, providing a possibility to the practical application.At the end of this paper, the MATLAB software is used to simulate the improved algorithm. Simulative results in different experimental scenarios verify the effectiveness and the reliability of improved distributed coverage algorithm, and provide reference and evaluation for the practical application of the algorithm.