In this paper, the area coverage problem of non-convex environments by a group of mobile robots is addressed. Each robot is equipped with a sensing device modeled through a range-limited visibility field. The network is assumed to be homogeneous in terms of nodes' sensing capabilities and general characteristics. A gradient-ascent control law is proposed, based on visibility-based Voronoi diagrams, leading the network to the optimal final state in terms of total area coverage. The provided simulation studies illustrate the results derived by the application of the proposed control scheme and validate its effectiveness.

The area coverage problem of non-convex environments by a group of mobile agents is examined is this article. The network is consisted of mobile sensing nodes whose sensing pattern is uniform based on the geodesic metric. The space under consideration is partitioned based on the geodesic distance among the nodes (geodesic Voronoi diagram), resulting in compact Voronoi sets. A distributed coordination scheme is proposed, that leads the network towards its optimal state (in area-wise terms) in a monotonic manner. Unlike previous results that rely on the Euclidean distance and/or the Voronoi partitioning of the convex hull of the environment, the control law results in motions of the mobile nodes in the interior of the environment. Simulation results further indicate the efficiency of the proposed approach.

In this article, a robot motion planning scheme for 3D-terrains is developed. Given the terrain profile and various obstacles on it, a navigation function is created. A geodesic based shortest path algorithm is developed to find the optimal lengthwise path towards the goal position. The path is then converted into a continuous smooth trajectory via an optimization scheme relying on a Bézier curve parametrization that satisfies the robot's kinodynamic constraints. The efficacy of the proposed method is tested in various simulation studies.