Pant and colleagues treat battery recharging as a disturbance to coverage control. Each robot is a hybrid system with three modes (coverage, return to base, recharge), and the energy constraint becomes a guard condition: leave for the base while there is still enough charge to get there. To keep the team’s network intact when robots leave, they build a bearing-rigid network in which neighbours have different energy levels, so they are unlikely to leave together, and repair it locally after each departure. A distributed MPC tracks the coverage reference while holding the desired bearings.
Findings
- A theorem shows that the designed guard conditions keep every robot’s state of charge positive through the mission.
- Simulation with 4 unicycle robots in a 5 m by 5 m area, recharge zone at the origin, initial charges 0.2, 0.6, 0.8 and 0.4, and speed limits of 1 m/s and π/2 rad/s. Over 300 steps no robot ran flat in the mission space, and the network reconfigured at step 90 when the first robots left.
Limits
- “Resilient” here covers planned departures only. Faults and attacks are out of scope.
- Four robots, numerical simulation only.
- The recharge zone is assumed to charge several robots at once (Assumption 1), and the guard uses minimum-time straight-line paths to the base, which ignores obstacles.
Relevance
A small case of long-term autonomy for robot teams: the team keeps working through battery cycles without a human. The same group’s integrity monitor is vijay-2025-range-integrity-monitoring, and the bearing-rigidity tools are shared between the two.
Links
- arXiv
- Subfield: Multi-robot systems, Control