Robust Online Multi-Robot Simultaneous Exploration and Coverage Path Planning

In this paper, a robust online Multi-robot Simultaneous exploration and coverage path planning problem is presented. The entire workspace is initially partitioned using a variant of Voronoi partitioning, Manhattan Voronoi, and the robots execute simultaneous exploration and coverage using Spanning Tree Coverage algorithm and cover the workspace. Once the robot(s) failure is detected the uncovered portions of the Voronoi cell of the failed robot will be shared between other eligible robots or a replacement strategy,if available, is performed. Simulation experiments within the V-rep environment is used to demonstrate and validate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Though the authors used the Spanning Tree Coverage algorithm for path planning for the purpose of demonstration, any suitable coverage algorithm may be used.