Multi-robot Dubins Coverage with Autonomous Surface Vehicles
  In large scale coverage operations, such as marine exploration or aerial
monitoring, single robot approaches are not ideal, as they may take too long to
cover a large area. In such scenarios, multi-robot approaches are preferable.
Furthermore, several real world vehicles are non-holonomic, but can be modeled
using Dubins vehicle kinematics. This paper focuses on environmental monitoring
of aquatic environments using Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs). In
particular, we propose a novel approach for solving the problem of complete
coverage of a known environment by a multi-robot team consisting of Dubins
vehicles. It is worth noting that both multi-robot coverage and Dubins vehicle
coverage are NP-complete problems. As such, we present two heuristics methods
based on a variant of the traveling salesman problem -- k-TSP -- formulation
and clustering algorithms that efficiently solve the problem. The proposed
methods are tested both in simulations to assess their scalability and with a
team of ASVs operating on a lake to ensure their applicability in real world.
