  This paper is concerned with the deployment of multiple mobile robots in
order to autonomously cover a region Q. The region to be covered is described
using a density function which may not be apriori known. In this paper, we pose
the coverage problem as an optimization problem over some space of functions on
Q. In particular, we look at L 2 -distance based coverage algorithm and derive
adaptive control laws for the same. We also propose a modified adaptive control
law incorporating consensus for better parameter convergence. We implement the
algorithms on real differential drive robots with both simulated density
function as well as density function implemented using light sources. We also
compare the L 2 -distance based method with the locational optimization method
using experiments.
