Multi-UAV Uniform Sweep Coverage in Unknown Environments: A Mergeable Nervous System (MNS)-Based Random Exploration

This paper investigates the problem of multi-UAV uniform sweep coverage, where a homogeneous swarm of UAVs must collectively and evenly visit every portion of an unknown environment for a sampling task without having access to their own location and orientation. Random walk-based exploration strategies are practical for such a coverage scenario as they do not rely on localization and are easily implementable in robot swarms. We demonstrate that the Mergeable Nervous System (MNS) framework, which enables a robot swarm to self-organize into a hierarchical ad-hoc communication network using local communication, is a promising control approach for random exploration in unknown environments by UAV swarms. To this end, we propose an MNS-based random walk approach where UAVs self-organize into a line formation using the MNS framework and then follow a random walk strategy to cover the environment while maintaining the formation. Through simulations, we test the efficiency of our approach against several decentralized random walk-based strategies as benchmarks. Our results show that the MNS-based random walk outperforms the benchmarks in terms of the time required to achieve full coverage and the coverage uniformity at that time, assessed across both the entire environment and within local regions.