Distributed multi-robot motion planning for cooperative multi-area coverage

The Cooperative Multi-Area Coverage (CMAC) refers to a class of complex tasks in which multiple robots are required to jointly cover multiple areas by performing specific operations while moving across them. Practical operations may be garbage clearance, demining, area scanning for information acquisition, and so on. This paper proposes a distributed motion planning method for multiple robots to cooperatively accomplish CMAC tasks. Firstly, a general multi-robot task model recently proposed, named multi-point dynamic aggregation (MPDA), is applied to formulate the multi-robot motion planning problem in CMAC. Then, a rule-based heuristic for the distributed motion planning of each single robot is set forth. Further, coordination mechanisms are proposed to coordinate multiple robots from the perspective of both task allocation and motion planning. Simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed motion planning method.