Cooperative coverage of rectilinear environments

A distributed cooperative coverage algorithm DC_R is presented, which is derived from an earlier complete single-robot algorithm, CC_R. DC_R executes independently on each robot in a team where the individual robots do not know the initial locations of their peers and applies to systems of robots operating in a rectilinear environment that use only intrinsic contact sensing to determine the boundaries of the environment. Due to the reactive nature of CC_R, the natural extension to DC_R preserves the completeness properties of the single-robot algorithm, and the outline of a completeness proof of DC_R is also presented. DC_R has been implemented in simulation, and directions for future work are presented which will make the algorithm more suited to physical robot systems