Optimal Agent Cooperation with Local Information

Effects of Multi-Robot Team Formations on Distributed Area Coverage

“…In most of the current multi-robot area coverage techniques, each robot performs and coordinates its motion individually. While individual coverage has shown promising results in many domains, there are a significant number of scenarios for multi-robot exploration such as extra-terrestrial exploration, robotic demining, unmanned search and rescue, etc., where the system can perform more efficiently if multiple robots with different types of sensors or redundant arrays of sensors can remain together as single or multiple cohesive teams (Cassinis, 2000;Chien et al, 2005;De Mot, 2005). For example, in the domain of robotic demining (Bloch, Milisavljevc, & Acheroy, 2007), where autonomous robots are used to detect buried landmines, the incidence of false positive readings from underground landmines can be significantly reduced if robots with different types of sensors such as ground penetrating radar (GPR), IR (infra-red) sensors and metal detectors are able to simultaneously analyze the signals from potential landmines.…”