Time‐sensitive coverage control for non‐holonomic and heterogeneous robots: An extremum seeking framework and application.

This work addresses a time‐sensitive coverage control problem for multiple non‐holonomic mobile robots. The coverage objective is evaluated by the total arrivial time of robots reaching their dominant clients with the predefined constant but heterogeneous velocities. An extremum‐seeking control framework is proposed, including a numerical optimizer that iteratively produces the optimal waypoints of robots minimizing the total arriving time and a state regulator that drives the robot's positions to the optimal locations under both constraints non‐holonomic kinematic model and the constant‐velocity. An improved K‐means algorithm is first designed to produce the waypoint sequence. A theoretical analysis of the convergence of coverage objectives is provided. Then a fixed‐time state regulator for the robot's angular velocity is derived from regulating robot positions to the desired waypoints within each time step that varies with the heterogeneous traversing velocity and the distance between waypoints. Finally, the results are validated by a virtual robotic simulation platform and the experiment on real robots, showing that the proposed methods can efficiently deploy multiple heterogeneous robots for time‐sensitive services to clients with a discrete distribution. The simulation and experimental code are open‐sourced at https://gitee.com/ahu‐icip/simulation.git. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]