Multi-robot cooperative area search and coverage method in uncertain environments

For the problem of multi-robot collaborative search and source localization in unknown environments, a distributed collaborative search and coverage method based on Voronoi diagrams is proposed. In order to assure safety, this method initially addresses collision problems caused by the physical dimensions and positioning faults of the robots by building Voronoi buffer zones based on each robot’s placement uncertainty radius. Utilizing sparse Gaussian process regression and the centroidal Voronoi tessellation (CVT) algorithm with an uncertainty regularization term, the distribution of the unknown concentration field is reconstructed to achieve collaborative coverage. An adaptive environmental exploration strategy is proposed to enable environment exploration without prior information. Simulation experiments demonstrate that this method can rapidly complete exploration of unknown environments and accurately locate the position of the pollution source.