Effects of Multi-Robot Team Formations on Distributed Area Coverage

Abstract

We consider the problem of distributed coverage of an initially unknown environment using a multi-robot system. We specifically focus on a coverage technique for coordinating teams of multiple mobile robots that are deployed and maintained in a certain formation while covering the environment. We have analyzed our technique theoretically and experimentally to verify its operation and performance within the Webots robot simulator as well as on physical robots. Our experimental results show that our coverage technique with robot teams moving in formation can perform comparably with a technique where the robots move individually while covering the environment. We 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.

Dynamic multi-robot team reconfiguration using weighted voting games

“…It is 7 cm in diameter, has 8 IR sensors with a 7 cm range and is capable of wireless communication via Bluetooth. We have used an overhead camera-based localisation system that is described in Dasgupta et al (2011). Each robot is provided with a triangular 'hat' with a different colour (blue, red, green, yellow, cyan and magenta).…”

“…For manoeuvring the team once it has reached a certain formation, we have used a multi-robot formation maintenance technique from Dasgupta, Whipple, and Cheng (2011) called leader-referenced flocking that is based on Reynolds (1987) flocking model. The main features of this formation maintenance mechanism are summarised in Figure 1(a).…”