  This research investigates decentralized control of mobile robots
specifically for coverage problems. There are different approaches associated
with decentralized control strategy for coverage control problems. We perform a
comparative review of these approaches and use the approach based on simple
local coordination rules. We investigate this extensively used nearest
neighbour rule based approach for developing coverage control algorithms. In
this approach, a mobile robot gives an equal importance to every neighbour
robot coming under its communication range. We develop our control approach by
making some of the mobile robots playing a more influential role than other
members in the team. The approach based on this control strategy becomes
efficient in terms of achieving a consensus on control inputs, say heading
angle, velocity, etc. The decentralized control of mobile robots can also
exhibit a cyclic behaviour under some physical constraints like a quantized
orientation of mobile robot. We further investigate the cyclic behaviour
appearing due to the quantized control of mobile robots under some conditions.
Our nearest neighbour rule based approach offers a biased strategy in case of
cyclic behaviour appearing in the team of mobile robots. We consider a
clustering technique inside the team of mobile robots. Our decentralized
control strategy calculates the similarity measure among the neighbours of a
mobile robot. The team of mobile robots with the similarity measure based
approach becomes efficient in achieving a fast consensus like on heading angle
or velocity. We perform a rigorous mathematical analysis of our developed
approach. We also develop a condition based on relaxed criteria for achieving
consensus on velocity or heading angle of the mobile robots. Our validation
approach is based on mathematical arguments and extensive computer simulations.
