Safe Coverage Control of Multi-Agent Systems and Its Verification in ROS/Gazebo Environment

Abstract

This paper presents safe coverage control algorithms for multi-agent systems, integrating Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation (CVT) and control barrier functions (CBFs). This study aims to ensure safety and spatial optimization by combining CVT and CBFs for obstacle avoidance, testing the controller through simulations, and verifying the results with RT mobile robots. This development of safe coverage control algorithms for multi-agent systems achieves a synergy that addresses both safety and spatial optimization, which are crucial for multi-agent systems. The proposed CVT-CBF-based controller has been validated through extensive simulations in the ROS/Gazebo environment and physical experiments with RT robots, demonstrating its effectiveness in achieving collision-free coverage. This study provides a comprehensive understanding of the integration of CVT and CBFs for safe coverage control with obstacle avoidance in multi-agent systems, highlighting both its potential and the necessary considerations for practical deployment.