Nair, V.G.Guruprasad, K.R.2026-02-052020Computers and Electrical Engineering, 2020, 85, , pp. -457906https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compeleceng.2020.106680https://idr.nitk.ac.in/handle/123456789/23835In 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 LtdMATLABMultipurpose robotsTrees (mathematics)Area coveragesCoverage problemFrontier-based explorationManhattan distanceMultirobotsSpanning treeVoronoi partitionIndustrial robots