Paper Info
Title
Multi-Agent Ergodic Coverage in Urban Environments
Abstract
An important aspect of dynamic urban coverage is how building collision avoidance is incorporated into the overall coverage mission. We consider a multi-agent urban dynamic coverage problem in which a team of Hying agents uses downward facing cameras to observe the street-level environment outside of buildings. Cameras are assumed to be ineffective above a maximum altitude (lower than building height), such that agents must move around or over buildings to complete their mission. The main objective of this paper is to compare three different building avoidance strategies that are compatible with dynamic ergodic methods. To provide context for these results, we also compare our results to three other common coverage methods including: boustrophedon coverage (lawn-mower sweep), Voronoi region based coverage, and a naive grid method. All algorithms are evaluated in simulation with respect to four performance metrics (percent coverage, revisit count, revisit time, and the integral of area viewed over time), across team sizes ranging from 1 to 25 agents, and in five types of urban environments of varying density and height. We find that the relative performance of algorithms changes based on the ratio of team size to search area, as well the height and density characteristics of the urban environment.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/ICRA48506.2021.9561257
2021 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION (ICRA 2021)
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Multi-Agent, Coverage, Lawn-mower, Ergodic, Boustrophedon, Voronoi, Urban Environment
Conference
2021
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1050-4729
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
27
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Shivang Patel100.68
Senthil Hariharan Arul231.76
Pranav Dhulipala300.34
Ming Lin47046525.99
Dinesh Manocha5198.38
Huan Xu612510.44
Michael W. Otte710515.06