Wide-area Persistent Coverage Control for Mobile Robots Considering Anisotropy of Sensory Range

Abstract

A persistent coverage control problem in a complex geometry environment is considered for two-wheeled mobile robots with anisotropic sensor ranges. The persistent coverage control is one of the coverage control methods, which covers the region persistently along the gradient of the time-varying density function. In this paper, we first focus on the persistent coverage control for the two-wheeled mobile robots assuming that the sensing region is anisotropic, and derive a control law which coordinates the rotation and the forward motion. In order to achieve coverage control in the environments with complex geometry, we propose a region assignment planning by employing Monte Carlo tree search for the area allocation. The strength and limitation of the proposed method are discussed based on simulation and experimental results.