Multi-Agent Deployment for Visibility Coverage in Polygonal Environments with Holes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a distributed algorithm enabling robotic agents with omnidirectional vision to autonomously deploy and achieve full visibility coverage in complex polygonal environments with holes, ensuring connectivity and efficiency.

Contribution

It presents a novel distributed deployment algorithm for agents with no prior environment knowledge, guaranteeing coverage, connectivity, and providing bounds on resources and performance.

Findings

Proves convergence of the deployment algorithm.

Provides upper bounds on deployment time and agent count.

Demonstrates robustness through simulations and extensions.

Abstract

This article presents a distributed algorithm for a group of robotic agents with omnidirectional vision to deploy into nonconvex polygonal environments with holes. Agents begin deployment from a common point, possess no prior knowledge of the environment, and operate only under line-of-sight sensing and communication. The objective of the deployment is for the agents to achieve full visibility coverage of the environment while maintaining line-of-sight connectivity with each other. This is achieved by incrementally partitioning the environment into distinct regions, each completely visible from some agent. Proofs are given of (i) convergence, (ii) upper bounds on the time and number of agents required, and (iii) bounds on the memory and communication complexity. Simulation results and description of robust extensions are also included.