Gossip Coverage Control for Robotic Networks: Dynamical Systems on the Space of Partitions

TL;DR

This paper introduces gossip-based coverage algorithms for robotic networks that operate asynchronously and with unreliable communication, modeling the deployment process as dynamical systems on partitions, and proves their convergence to optimal coverage configurations.

Contribution

It presents novel gossip-based algorithms for robot coverage that require only pairwise, asynchronous communication and models the process as dynamical systems on partitions, ensuring convergence.

Findings

Algorithms converge to centroidal Voronoi partitions

Require only pairwise, asynchronous communication

Convergence proven under mild conditions

Abstract

Future applications in environmental monitoring, delivery of services and transportation of goods motivate the study of deployment and partitioning tasks for groups of autonomous mobile agents. These tasks are achieved by recent coverage algorithms, based upon the classic methods by Lloyd. These algorithms however rely upon critical requirements on the communication network: information is exchanged synchronously among all agents and long-range communication is sometimes required. This work proposes novel coverage algorithms that require only gossip communication, i.e., asynchronous, pairwise, and possibly unreliable communication. Which robot pair communicates at any given time may be selected deterministically or randomly. A key innovative idea is describing coverage algorithms for robot deployment and environment partitioning as dynamical systems on a space of partitions. In other words, we study the evolution of the regions assigned to each agent rather than the evolution of the agents' positions. The proposed gossip algorithms are shown to converge to centroidal Voronoi partitions under mild technical conditions.