Coverage control with unicycles via hybrid modeling

This paper presents a gradient-descent coverage algorithm for a group of nonholonomic vehicles. Similar to previous approaches, the deployment strategy relies on locational optimization techniques to assign Voronoi regions to vehicles. The algorithm is distributed in the sense of the Delaunay graph. In order to deal with unicycle dynamics and guarantee performance, we introduce several vehicle modes; i.e., forward movement, rotation in place and resting. The analysis of the algorithm relies on a recently introduced invariance principle for hybrid systems.