Coverage Control of Mobile Robots With Different Maximum Speeds for Time-Sensitive Applications

This letter presents a coverage control algorithm for robots with different maximum speeds to effectively cover an area in terms of time of travel. In order to utilize the different speeds of the robots, the region of dominance of a robot is approximated by the set of points where the robot can arrive faster than any other robots in the team by cruising at its maximum speed. Multiplicatively weighted Voronoi diagrams are used to express these speed weighted regions of dominance of the robots. The new cost function of the system takes time instead of distance as its basis, and it is interpreted as the summation of time for robots to reach all weighted points in the coverage domain. We use a controller that drives the robots towards the weighted centroids of their cells, which locally minimizes the new cost function. The resulting final configuration of the robots is shown to provide a temporally optimal coverage instead of a spatially optimal coverage over a domain.