Coverage Control for Wire-Traversing Robots

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel coverage control algorithm for wire-traversing robots that ensures continuous, constrained motion along wires using a Continuous Onto Wires map, validated through simulations and real robot experiments.

Contribution

It presents a new method for coverage control on wires using a Continuous Onto Wires map and a projection step to optimize robot configurations.

Findings

Algorithm successfully maintains continuous robot motion on wires.

Effective in simulation and real-world robot experiments.

Achieves local minimization of coverage cost on wire networks.

Abstract

In this paper we consider the coverage control problem for a team of wire-traversing robots. The two-dimensional motion of robots moving in a planar environment has to be projected to one-dimensional manifolds representing the wires. Starting from Lloyd's descent algorithm for coverage control, a solution that generates continuous motion of the robots on the wires is proposed. This is realized by means of a Continuous Onto Wires (COW) map: the robots' workspace is mapped onto the wires on which the motion of the robots is constrained to be. A final projection step is introduced to ensure that the configuration of the robots on the wires is a local minimizer of the constrained locational cost. An algorithm for the continuous constrained coverage control problem is proposed and it is tested both in simulation and on a team of mobile robots.