Effects of Multi-Robot Team Formations on Distributed Area Coverage

Abstract

This paper examines the problem of distributed coverage of an initially unknown environment using a multi-robot system. Specifically, focus is on a coverage technique for coordinating teams of multiple mobile robots that are deployed and maintained in a certain formation while covering the environment. The technique is analyzed theoretically and experimentally to verify its operation and performance within the Webots robot simulator, as well as on physical robots. Experimental results show that the described coverage technique with robot teams moving in formation can perform comparably with a technique where the robots move individually while covering the environment. The authors also quantify the effect of various parameters of the system, such as the size of the robot teams, the presence of localization, and wheel slip noise, as well as environment related features like the size of the environment and the presence of obstacles and walls on the performance of the area coverage operation.

Um modelo baseado em autômatos celulares e algoritmos genéticos para a navegação de um time de robôs visando o controle de formação e o desvio de obstáculos

“…The Webots simulator, shown in Figure 12, is a powerful robotic simulation platform that offers fast prototyping of mobile robots, flexible environment simulation and realistic modeling [5]. The cross-compilation option enabled us to to build a model which can be later transferred to a real robot.…”

“…An MRS, composed by simple robots, offers more advantages than a large, complex, and expensive single-robot. Multiple robots, when precisely coordinated, can fulfill more complex tasks by improving efficiency and robustness, and providing parallelism (redundancy) [4], [5].…”