On Limited-Range Coverage Control for Large-Scale Teams of Aerial Drones: Deployment and Study

When considering a multi-robot aerial system, coverage control can be seen as a basic behavior serving as a building block for complex mission. However, when the number of units in play becomes too high, centralized and global optimal solutions might not scale well, causing a reduction in efficiency and reactiveness. To this end, in this manuscript we propose and analyze a control methodology for area coverage that is fully distributed and is able to mitigate the above factors while still providing high performances. The approach we propose in this manuscript relies on local Voronoi partitioning constrained by limited robot sensing and communication capabilities. To validate our approach, we perform an ablation study over a large set of simulations that we evaluate with a set of proposed metrics. At the same time, the algorithm has been tested on the field, with real quad-copters, and with a set of proof of concept experiments deploying up to seven aerial units.