Coverage control of autonomous vehicles for oil spill cleaning in dynamic and uncertain environments
Xin Jin, Asok Kumar Ray · 2013
In the context of oil spill cleaning by autonomous vehicles in dynamic and uncertain environments, this paper presents a multi-resolution algorithm that seamlessly integrates the concepts of local navigation and global navigation based on the sensory information; the objective here is to enable adaptive decision-making and online replanning of paths. The proposed algorithm provides a complete coverage of the search area for cleanup of the oil spills and does not suffer from the problem of having local minima, which is commonly encountered in potential-field-based methods. The efficacy of the algorithm is tested on a high-fidelity Player/Stage simulator for oil spill cleaning in a harbor, where the underlying oil weathering process is modeled as 2D random-walk particle tracking.