多机器人协同覆盖路径规划,兼顾连通性与效率
Multi-CAP: A Multi-Robot Connectivity-Aware Hierarchical Coverage Path Planning Algorithm for Unknown Environments
- 构建动态连通图,将未知环境划分为连通子区域
- 通过车辆路径问题优化分配,减少路径重叠与总长度
- 适合大型未知环境中需高效协作的多机器人系统
在未知大环境中高效协调多机器人进行全覆盖是一项挑战,需最小化总路径长度并减少机器人间冲突。本文提出一种多机器人连通性感知分层覆盖路径规划算法(Multi-CAP),通过构建并动态维护反映环境连通性的邻接图,将空间划分为连通子区域。假设环境虽未知但有界,支持在线增量更新邻接图,确保其结构准确反映已观测与未观测区域的真实布局。将子区域分配问题建模为车辆路径问题(VRP),求解不相交巡游路径以最小化冗余移动,使每台机器人获得唯一且无冲突的任务区域。各机器人独立执行分配路径,基于实时传感器数据调整子区域内的覆盖策略以缩短路径。仿真与多机器人硬件实验表明,Multi-CAP在覆盖率、总路径长度和路径重叠率等关键指标上显著优于现有方法。消融实验进一步验证了连通性感知图与全局路径规划器的关键作用。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Efficient coordination of multiple robots for coverage of large, unknown environments is a significant challenge that involves minimizing the total coverage path length while reducing inter-robot conflicts. In this paper, we introduce a Multi-robot Connectivity-Aware Planner (Multi-CAP), a hierarchical coverage path planning algorithm that facilitates multi-robot coordination through a novel connectivity-aware approach. The algorithm constructs and dynamically maintains an adjacency graph that represents the environment as a set of connected subareas. Critically, we make the assumption that the environment, while unknown, is bounded. This allows for incremental refinement of the adjacency graph online to ensure its structure represents the physical layout of the space, both in observed and unobserved areas of the map as robots explore the environment. We frame the task of assigning subareas to robots as a Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), a well-studied problem for finding optimal routes for a fleet of vehicles. This is used to compute disjoint tours that minimize redundant travel, assigning each robot a unique, non-conflicting set of subareas. Each robot then executes its assigned tour, independently adapting its coverage strategy within each subarea to minimize path length based on real-time sensor observations of the subarea. We demonstrate through simulations and multi-robot hardware experiments that Multi-CAP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in key metrics, including coverage time, total path length, and path overlap ratio. Ablation studies further validate the critical role of our connectivity-aware graph and the global tour planner in achieving these performance gains.
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