Manhattan Distance Based Voronoi Partitioning for Efficient Multi-robot Coverage

In this paper we address the problem of area coverage using multiple cooperating robots. One of the main concerns of using multiple robots is of avoiding repetitive coverage apart from complete coverage of the given area. Partitioning the area to be covered into cells and allotting one each cell to each of the robots for coverage is a simple and elegant solution for this problem. However, the spacial partitioning may lead to additional problems leading to either incomplete coverage or coverage overlap near the partition boundary. We propose a manhattan distance based Voronoi partitioning scheme of \(2D\times 2D\) gridded region, where D is the size of the robot footprint. We show that the proposed partitioning scheme completely eliminates coverage gaps and coverage overlap using illustrative results.