Spontaneous Area Coverage and Mapping of Restricted Zones with Multiple Mobile Agents
Ertug Olcay, Yixing Zhai · IFAC-PapersOnLine · 2022
Spontaneous area coverage with multiple cooperative agents has been widely studied in different disciplines, including computer science, biology, statistical physics, and engineering. However, in coverage and exploration missions with autonomous agents, the mapping of restricted subareas has been barely addressed. In this study, we propose a distributed area coverage control and mapping framework to explore and map an unknown 2D environment with multiple agents. Tangent Bug, together with a flood fill inspired algorithm is utilized to circumnavigate and recognize the restricted area in the environment. The proposed framework is easy-scalable with respect to the number of agents, adaptable to environmental changes, and simple to implement.