Discrete Partitioning and Coverage Control for Asynchronous Gossiping Robots

This thesis proposes distributed algorithms to automatically deploy a group of robotic agents and provide coverage of a discretized environment represented by a graph. The algorithms presented converge to a centroidal Voronoi partition using only pairwise gossip communication between the agents. The communication protocols for the algorithms are Synchronous Gossiping communication and Asynchronous Broadcast communication. Both algorithms have been implemented by the author of the thesis in MATLAB. This thesis proves that both algorithms make the territory ownership to converge to a pairwise-optimal partition in finite time. Additionally, some simulations are done in MATLAB proving how the Asynchronous Broadcast coverage algorithm reduces the amount of communications for large teams in large environments