Distributed navigation of multi-robot systems for sensing coverage

A team of coordinating mobile robots equipped with operation specific sensors canperform different coverage tasks. If the required number of robots in the team isvery large then a centralized control system becomes a complex strategy. Thereare also some areas where centralized communication turns into an issue. So, ateam of mobile robots for coverage tasks should have the ability of decentralized ordistributed decision making. This thesis investigates decentralized control of mobilerobots specifically for coverage problems. A decentralized control strategy is ideallybased on local information and it can offer flexibility in case there is an incrementor decrement in the number of mobile robots. We perform a broad survey of theexisting literature for coverage control problems. There are different approachesassociated with decentralized control strategy for coverage control problems. Weperform a comparative review of these approaches and use the approach based onsimple local coordination rules. These locally computed nearest neighbour rules areused to develop decentralized control algorithms for coverage control problems.We investigate this extensively used nearest neighbour rule-based approach fordeveloping coverage control algorithms. In this approach, a mobile robot gives anequal importance to every neighbour robot coming under its communication range.We develop our control approach by making some of the mobile robots playinga more influential role than other members of the team. We develop the controlalgorithm based on nearest neighbour rules with weighted average functions. Theapproach based on this control strategy becomes efficient in terms of achieving aconsensus on control inputs, say heading angle, velocity, etc.The decentralized control of mobile robots can also exhibit a cyclic behaviourunder some physical constraints like a quantized orientation of the mobile robot.We further investigate the cyclic behaviour appearing due to the quantized controlof mobile robots under some conditions. Our nearest neighbour rule-based approachoffers a biased strategy in case of cyclic behaviour appearing in the team of mobilerobots.We consider a clustering technique inside the team of mobile robots. Our decentralizedcontrol strategy calculates the similarity measure among the neighboursof a mobile robot. The team of mobile robots with the similarity measure basedapproach becomes efficient in achieving a fast consensus like on heading angle orvelocity. We perform a rigorous mathematical analysis of our developed approach.We also develop a condition based on relaxed criteria for achieving consensus onvelocity or heading angle of the mobile robots. Our validation approach is based onmathematical arguments and extensive computer simulations