A Distributed Deployment Algorithm for Mobile Robotic Agents with Limited Sensing/Communication Ranges

In this paper, we propose a distributed deployment algorithm for a group of mobile robots to cover a convex region. The individual mobile robot considered has kinematic constraints, and may only exchange information locally with its neighboring counterparts due to its limited sensing/communication range. The proposed deployment algorithm iteratively updates the Voronoi partition through local information exchange, and then moves toward its centroid based on centroid-drive control algorithms. Particularly, in addition to gradient-based centroid-drive control algorithm in which input-output linearization has been applied to robot model, a new algorithm based on distributed consensus is proposed to directly address the kinematic constraint associated with robot model. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.