Revisiting coverage control in nonconvex environments using visibility sets

In the context of robotics coverage describes the deployment of mobile sensors or agents in a target area. This paper presents a new solution to coverage in nonconvex environments. We apply a modification to the coverage approach in (Cortes, et.al., 2004), making use of visibility sets and a contraction of the environment, leading to a change in the bounds of integration. The resulting feedback control is fully distributed, has guaranteed, inherent collision avoidance without separate path planning and reduced communication and computation requirements compared to similar approaches. We also formulate an extension to agents with limited sensing range. Our method works in unknown environments, if all regions are of equal interest. We provide simulation results demonstrating the advantageous properties of the approach.