Dynamic Partitioning and Coverage Control with Asynchronous One-to-Base-Station Communication

We propose algorithms to automatically deploy a group of mobile robots to provide coverage of a non-convex environment with communication limitations. In settings such as hilly terrain or for underwater ocean gliders, peer-to-peer communication can be impossible and frequent communication to a central base station may be impractical. This paper instead explores how to perform coverage control when each robot has only asynchronous and sporadic communication with a base station or, alternatively, with the rest of the team. Our approach evolves overlapping territories and provably converges to a centroidal Voronoi partition at equilibrium. We also describe how the use of overlapping territories allows our algorithm to smoothly handle dynamic changes to the robot team.