Faculty Publications
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Item GeoDesic-VPC: Spatial partitioning for multi-robot coverage problem(Acta Press journals@actapress.com, 2020) Nair, V.G.; Guruprasad, K.R.In this paper, we address a problem of area coverage using multiple cooperating robots using a “partition and cover" approach, where the area of interest is decomposed into as many cells as the robots, and each robot is assigned the task of covering a cell. While the most partitioning approaches used in the literature in the context of a robotic coverage problem may result in topologically disconnected cells in the presence of obstacles leading to incomplete coverage, we propose to use geodesic distance-based generalization of the Voronoi partition, ensuring that each cell that is allotted for a robot for coverage is a topologically connected region, and hence, achieving a complete coverage. The proposed multi-robot coverage strategy is demonstrated with simulation in MATLAB and V-rep simulator, using two single-robot coverage algorithms reported in the literature, namely boustrophedon decomposition-based coverage and spanning tree-based coverage algorithms. © 2020 SAE International. All rights reserved.Item GM-VPC: An Algorithm for Multi-robot Coverage of Known Spaces Using Generalized Voronoi Partition(Cambridge University Press, 2020) Nair, V.G.; Guruprasad, K.R.SUMMARY In this paper we address the problem of coverage path planning (CPP) for multiple cooperating mobile robots. We use a 'partition and cover' approach using Voronoi partition to achieve natural passive cooperation between robots to avoid task duplicity. We combine two generalizations of Voronoi partition, namely geodesic-distance-based Voronoi partition and Manhattan-distance-based Voronoi partition, to address contiguity of partition in the presence of obstacles and to avoid partition-boundary-induced coverage gap. The region is divided into 2D×2D grids, where D is the size of the robot footprint. Individual robots can use any of the single-robot CPP algorithms. We show that with the proposed Geodesic-Manhattan Voronoi-partition-based coverage (GM-VPC), a complete and non-overlapping coverage can be achieved at grid level provided that the underlying single-robot CPP algorithm has similar property.We demonstrated using two representative single-robot coverage strategies, namely Boustrophedon-decomposition-based coverage and Spanning Tree coverage, first based on so-called exact cellular decomposition and second based on approximate cellular decomposition, that the proposed partitioning scheme completely eliminates coverage gaps and coverage overlaps. Simulation experiments using Matlab and V-rep robot simulator and experiments with Fire Bird V mobile robot are carried out to validate the proposed coverage strategy. © © Cambridge University Press 2019.Item MR-SimExCoverage: Multi-robot Simultaneous Exploration and Coverage(Elsevier Ltd, 2020) Nair, V.G.; Guruprasad, K.R.In this paper, we present a novel problem of simultaneous exploration and area coverage by multiple cooperating mobile robots. As the robots cover an initially unknown region, they perform intermittent exploration of the region and build a map, which in turn is used to plan the coverage path. We use a Voronoi partition based multi-robot coverage strategy using the Manhattan distance metric to solve the coverage problem and a frontier based exploration strategy for exploration mapping. We provide results of simulation using Matlab/V-rep environments to demonstrate the proposed multi-robot simultaneous exploration and coverage (MR-SimExCoverage) problem using the spanning tree based coverage (STC) algorithm. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd