Density-Driven Area Coverage for Nonholonomic Multi-Robot Systems with Safety Guarantee

2026-09-18

AI Summary

本文针对非完整多机器人系统的安全覆盖问题，通过结合密度驱动最优控制与控制屏障函数安全滤波器的方法，直接在物理输入上施加安全约束，确保了安全性和覆盖性能。

Abstract

Density-Driven Optimal Control (D2OC) provides a principled approach to distributing multi-robot teams over non-uniform spatial distributions. Applying D2OC to nonholonomic robots, however, creates a gap between safety constraints imposed on a reference motion and the physical inputs that determine the actual robot motion. We address this issue by enforcing the safety constraint directly on the robot's physical inputs while preserving the density-driven coverage objective. The proposed framework combines D2OC with a control barrier function safety filter through a feedback-linearizing look-ahead point, allowing safety and actuator limits to be considered together during control. We further derive a safety margin that accounts for the look-ahead geometry, robot footprint, and motion during each control interval. Simulation results show that the proposed method maintains the required physical separation while achieving coverage performance comparable to a conventional reference-tracking approach, which can satisfy safety on the reference motion yet violate the corresponding physical clearance. Experiments on multiple nonholonomic robots in the Robotarium further demonstrate safe execution while driving the robots toward the desired spatial distribution. These results show that enforcing safety directly on the physical inputs can eliminate the mismatch between safety certification and physical robot motion in density-driven multi-robot coverage.

Problem

• Density-Driven Optimal Control
• nonholonomic robots
• safety constraint
• physical inputs
• coverage

Innovation

• Density-Driven Optimal Control
• Control Barrier Function
• Nonholonomic Robots
• Safety Margin