  Multi-robot coverage is crucial in numerous applications, including
environmental monitoring, search and rescue operations, and precision
agriculture. In modern applications, a multi-robot team must collaboratively
explore unknown spatial fields in GPS-denied and extreme environments where
global localization is unavailable. Coverage algorithms typically assume that
the robot positions and the coverage environment are defined in a global
reference frame. However, coordinating robot motion and ensuring coverage of
the shared convex workspace without global localization is challenging. This
paper proposes a novel anchor-oriented coverage (AOC) approach to generate
dynamic localized Voronoi partitions based around a common anchor position. We
further propose a consensus-based coordination algorithm that achieves
agreement on the coverage workspace around the anchor in the robots' relative
frames of reference. Through extensive simulations and real-world experiments,
we demonstrate that the proposed anchor-oriented approach using localized
Voronoi partitioning performs as well as the state-of-the-art coverage
controller using GPS.
