Coverage Control of Multi-Robot System for Dynamic Cleaning of Oil Spills

This paper addressed the dynamic cleaning of oil spills using a multi-robot system. The cleaning process is performed using a group of aerial agents adaptively covering an oil spill considering its advection and spreading on the sea surface. The concept of Voronoi Tessellation is employed to command the autonomous vehicles on how to adapt its configuration with the dynamic oil spill. Once the spill tracking error reduces to the desired value, all of the agents spray dispersant on the oil spill. This solution prevents wasting the excess amount of dispersant that is often being sprayed in conventional methods by aircraft. A distributed sliding mode control scheme is proposed to navigate the agents to the near-optimal Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation (CVT) by targeting the thick layers. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy can efficiently track the trajectory of the polluted area, and adaptively cover the time-varying shape of the oil spill.