Multi-Robot Persistent Coverage

efficient planning solutions for repetitive monitoring tasks

Environmental monitoring, security and surveillance or dust cleaning are repetitive tasks perfectly tailored for the use of multi-robot systems. Persistent coverage offers a general framework to address these problems in a compact and formal way. We have developed several perception, control and planning solutions where teams of robots efficiently execute a persistent coverage task in complex environments.

We consider scenarios where the coverage quality of the environment deteriorates with time, requiring every point of the environment to be constantly revisited by at least one robot. Our methods enable optimal workload partitions in complex and/or discretized environments, as well as joint efforts over the whole domain [2]. We have also developed different path planning algorithms for the team of robots under a variety of situations that guarantee optimality in their trajectories with respect to the coverage level.

Our solutions have been tested in a multi-robot cleaning application, shown in the videos, but also in a cooking stove with mobile heating inductors as part of a collaboration with BSH Electrodomésticos España.

References

[1] José Manuel Palacios-Gasós, Danilo Tardioli, Eduardo Montijano, Carlos Sagüés. "Equitable persistent coverage of non-convex environments with graph-based planning". The International Journal of Robotics Research 38 (14), 1674-1694. 2019

[2] José Manuel Palacios-Gasós, Eduardo Montijano, Carlos Sagues, Sergio Llorente. "Distributed coverage estimation and control for multirobot persistent tasks". IEEE Transactions on Robotics 32 (6), 1444-1460. 2016

[3] José Manuel Palacios-Gasós, Eduardo Montijano, Carlos Sagues, Sergio Llorente. "Cooperative Periodic Coverage With Collision Avoidance". IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology 27 (4), 1411-1422. 2018

[4] José Manuel Palacios-Gasós, Zeynab Talebpour, Eduardo Montijano, Carlos Sagüés, Alcherio Martinoli. "Optimal path planning and coverage control for multi-robot persistent coverage in environments with obstacles". 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 1321-1327

[5] José Manuel Palacios-Gasós, Eduardo Montijano, Carlos Sagues, Sergio Llorente. "Multi-robot persistent coverage with optimal times". 2016 IEEE 55th Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 3511-3517

[6] José Manuel Palacios-Gasós, Eduardo Montijano, Carlos Sagues, Sergio Llorente. "Multi-robot persistent coverage using branch and bound". 2016 American Control Conference (ACC), 5697-5702

[7] José Manuel Palacios-Gasós, Eduardo Montijano, Carlos Sagüés, Sergio Llorente. "Distributed coverage estimation for multi-robot persistent tasks". 2015 European Control Conference (ECC). pp. 3681-3686