Robotic simulation of gases for a surveillance task

Abstract

The task addressed here requires a swarm of mobile robots to monitor a long corridor, i.e., by sweeping through it while avoiding large obstacles such as buildings. In the case of limited sensors and communication, maintaining spatial coverage - especially after passing the obstacles - is a challenging problem. Note that the main objective of this task is coverage. There are two primary methods for agents to achieve coverage: by uniformly increasing the inter-agent distances, and by moving the swarm as a whole. This paper presents a physics-based solution to the task that is based on a kinetic theory approach; our solution achieves both forms of coverage. Furthermore, the paper describes how we transition from our original algorithm to an algorithm utilizing mostly local sensor information, the latter being more realistic for modeling robots. To determine how well our kinetic theory approach performs against a popular alternative controller, experimental comparisons are presented.