2010/08/29 by Durham, Joseph W., Carli, Ruggero, Bullo, Francesco
#FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Mathematics #Optimization and Control (math.OC) #Robotics (cs.RO)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1008.4941
We propose distributed algorithms to automatically deploy a group of robotic agents and provide coverage of a discretized environment represented by a graph. The classic Lloyd approach to coverage optimization involves separate centering and partitioning steps and converges to the set of centroidal Voronoi partitions. In this work we present a novel graph coverage algorithm which achieves better performance without this separation while requiring only pairwise ``gossip'' communication between agents. Our new algorithm provably converges to an element of the set of pairwise-optimal partitions, a subset of the set of centroidal Voronoi partitions. We illustrate that this new equilibrium set represents a significant performance improvement through numerical comparisons to existing Lloyd-type methods. Finally, we discuss ways to efficiently do the necessary computations.