Energy-aware coverage control with docking for robot teams

In this paper, we formulate a distributed, energy-aware control policy aimed at enabling persistent surveillance of a specified region of interest by teams of networked robots. Central to our formulation is the fundamental idea that as an agent participating in coverage approaches a low energy reserve the team should cooperatively adjust the coverage formation to allow the agent to return to a designated base station, where it can recharge before rejoining the effort. Towards this end, we build upon recent efforts in employing Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation (CVT)-based coverage control laws by defining a policy that exploits a power-dependent weighting scheme that embeds an agent's trade-off to achieve its coverage mission and to maintain a desired energy reserve to guarantee its own safety. Stability of the proposed approach is considered, and we show that coupling our continuous controller with a straightforward switching mechanism guarantees every agent will return to its base station safely. Simulation results are presented to verify and demonstrate the utility of the proposed control scheme.