  Swarm robot systems, which consist of many cooperating mobile robots, have
attracted attention for their environmental adaptability and fault tolerance
advantages. One of the most important tasks for such systems is coverage
control, in which robots autonomously deploy to approximate a given spatial
distribution. In this study, we formulate a coverage control paradigm using the
concept of optimal transport and propose a novel control technique, which we
have termed the optimal transport-based coverage control (OTCC) method. The
proposed OTCC, derived via the gradient flow of the cost function in the
Kantorovich dual problem, is shown to covers a widely used existing control
method as a special case. We also perform a Lyapunov stability analysis of the
controlled system, and provide numerical calculations to show that the OTCC
reproduces target distributions with better performance than the existing
control method.
