Triggered Minimum Spanning Tree for distributed coverage with connectivity maintenance

We study the problem of distributed coverage with connectivity maintenance for robot networks with range-limited communication and sensing.We let the robots perform coverage while keeping a set of communication links. The structure that ensures that the network does not get disconnected, and that provides the highest freedom of robot motions is the Minimum-distance Spanning Tree (MST). As robots move to perform the coverage task, their distances change as well and this MST becomes obsolete. Computing the MST at each coverage step may be too communication demanding. The contribution of this paper is the proposal of a triggering strategy, where agents decide when to compute a new MST of the graph. In our simulations, we show that our method achieves a similar coverage goal as the one computing the MST at each step, whereas it has much lower communication costs.