Balanced Line Coverage in Large-scale Urban Scene

Line coverage is to cover linear infrastructure modeled as 1D segments by robots, which received attention in recent years. With the increasing urbanization, the area of the city and the density of infrastructure continues to increase, which brings two issues: (1) Due to the energy constraint, it is hard for the homogeneous robot team to cover the large-scale linear infrastructure starting from one depot; (2) In the large urban scene, the imbalance of robots' path greatly extends the time cost of the multi-robot system, which is more serious than that in smaller-size scenes. To address these issues, we propose a heterogeneous multi-robot approach consisting of several teams, each of which contains one transportation robot (TRob) and several coverage robots (CRobs). Firstly, a balanced graph partitioning (BGP) algorithm is proposed to divide the road network into several similar-size sub-graphs, and then the TRob delivers a group of CRobs to the subgraph region quickly. Secondly, a balanced ulusoy partitioning (BUP) algorithm is proposed to extract similar-length tours for each CRob from the sub-graph. Abundant experiments are conducted on seven road networks ranging in scales that are collected in this paper. Our method achieves robot utilization of 90% and the best maximal tour length at the cost of a small increase in total tour length, which further minimizes the time cost of the whole system. The source code and the road networks are available at https://github.com/suhangsong/BLC-LargeScale.