Distributed Reactive Navigation of Robotic Teams for Sweep Coverage of a Corridor Environment with an Obstacle Course

A team of mobile robots travels with an upper-bounded speed in a corridor environment, which contains obstacles. The team should sweep the corridor with a given speed, while autonomously lining up on a moving cross-section of the corridor and evenly distributing themselves over this section. The robots should also avoid collisions with one another, the obstacles, and the corridor sides. In the parts of the corridor containing obstacles, the requirement to achieve or maintain the even distribution is forcedly relaxed. However, the even distribution should be automatically restored after such a part is left behind. In its local frame, every robot has access to the corridor direction and to the relative coordinates of the objects that lie within a finite range of visibility The robots are unaware of the team size and the corridor width, are unable to distinguish between the peers or play different roles in the team. A computationally inexpensive and distributed control algorithm is presented that solves the mission. The performance of the proposed navigation law is justified by a mathematically rigorous global convergence result and is confirmed by computer simulation tests.