Coverage Control and map building for Gossiping Robotic Networks

Future applications in environmental monitoring, delivery of services and transportation of goods motivate the study of deployment and partitioning tasks for groups of autonomous mobile agents. These tasks are achieved by recent coverage algorithms, based upon the classic methods by Lloyd. These algorithms, however, rely upon critical requirements on the communication network: information is exchanged synchronously among all agents and long-range communication is sometimes required. In the first part of this talk, we discuss novel coverage algorithms that require only gossip communication, i.e., asynchronous, pairwise, and possibly unreliable communication. Which robot pair communicates at any given time may be selected deterministically or randomly. A key innovative idea is describing coverage algorithms for robot deployment and environment partitioning as dynamical systems on a space of partitions. In other words, we study the evolution of the regions assigned to each agent rather than the evolution of the agents’ positions. The proposed gossip algorithms are shown to converge to centroidal Voronoi partitions under mild technical conditions. We also discuss how to extend this novel approach to other communication protocols, like asynchronous gossip and asynchronous broadcast.

The final part of the talk is devoted to the case where the multicenter function dictating the coverage is unknown and possibly time-varying; in this scenario, we combine the coverage algorithms to estimation procedures which pair Gaussian processes regression with Kalman filtering techniques.

Bio: Ruggero Carli received the Laurea Degree in Computer Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering from the University of Padova, Padova, Italy, in 2004 and 2007, respectively. From 2008 through 2010, he was a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California at Santa Barbara. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova. His interests include networked control systems, multi-agent systems with special focus on distributed optimization and estimation, wireless sensor networks, smart grids and cooperative robotics.