On Combining Multi-robot Coverage and Reciprocal Collision Avoidance

Although robotic coverage and collision avoidance are active areas of robotics research, the avoidance of collision situations between robots has often been neglected in the context of multi-robot coverage tasks. In fact, for robots of physical size, collisions are likely to happen during deployment and coverage in densely packed multi-robot configurations. For this reason, we aim to motivate by this paper the combined use of multi-robot coverage and reciprocal collision avoidance. We present a taxonomy of collision scenarios in multi-robot coverage problems. In particular, coverage tasks with built-in heterogeneity such as multiple antagonistic objectives or robot constraints are shown to benefit from the combination. Based on our taxonomy, we evaluate four representative robotic use cases in simulation by combining the specific methods of Voronoi coverage and reciprocal velocity obstacles.