Distributed coverage using geodesic metric for non-convex environments

Michalis Thanou, Yiannis John Stergiopoulos, Anthony Tzes

Abstract: The area coverage problem of non-convex environments by a group of mobile agents is examined is this article. The network is consisted of mobile sensing nodes whose sensing pattern is uniform based on the geodesic metric. The space under consideration is partitioned based on the geodesic distance among the nodes (geodesic Voronoi diagram), resulting in compact Voronoi sets. A distributed coordination scheme is proposed, that leads the network towards its optimal state (in area-wise terms) in a monotonic manner. Unlike previous results that rely on the Euclidean distance and/or the Voronoi partitioning of the convex hull of the environment, the control law results in motions of the mobile nodes in the interior of the environment. Simulation results further indicate the efficiency of the proposed approach.