Multi-Robot Distributed Coverage in Realistic Environments

Abstract

A patrolling behavior is developed for a group of social robots used in a hospital. The robots interact with humans and are used for edutainment activities in the children's ward of IPOL, Portugal. Based on centroidal Voronoi coverage and extending existing ideas within robotic coverage, the behavior is scalable in the number of robots and robust to robot failures, allowing for exit and re-entry at run-time. Three types of experiments are performed and measured in terms of a cost function for coverage efficiency, and tested on different maps. Experiments are performed in simulation and in reality with robots in an office environment similar to the real hospital. The implementation works well in convex environments and one main challenge is to make it work in a nonconvex environment as well. The chosen approach uses virtual generating points, and other approaches are discussed with potential for improvements by using the geodesic distance measure or discrete graphs.