Multi-robot forest coverage

Abstract

One of the main applications of mobile robots is terrain coverage: visiting each location in known terrain. Terrain coverage is crucial for lawn mowing, cleaning, harvesting, search-and-rescue, intrusion detection and mine clearing. Naturally, coverage can be sped up with multiple robots. In this paper, we describe multi-robot forest coverage, a new multi-robot coverage algorithm based on an algorithm by Even et al. (2004) for finding a tree cover with trees of balanced weights. The cover time of multi-robot forest coverage is at most eight times larger than optimal, and our experiments show it to perform significantly better than existing multi-robot coverage algorithms.