Cooperative Online Workspace Allocation in the Presence of Obstacles for Multi-robot Simultaneous Exploration and Coverage Path Planning Problem

In this paper, a dynamic workspace allocation methodology for coverage path planning using multiple robots in the presence of obstacles is presented. The entire workspace is initially partitioned using the Manhattan Voronoi partitioning method, without considering the obstacles present, and the robots execute Multi-Robot Simultaneous Exploration and Coverage (MRSimExCoverage) using the Spanning Tree Coverage (STC) algorithm and cover the workspace. A dynamic workspace re-allocation strategy to optimize the area covered by each robot, whenever obstacles are detected, so as to avoid certain obstacle-induced coverage issues is studied. Simulation experiments within the Matlab/V-rep environment are used to demonstrate and validate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Though the authors used the STC algorithm for path planning for demonstration, any suitable coverage algorithm may be used.