Multiple mobile robot surveillance in unknown environments

Abstract

This research aims to deal with the fundamental problems that arise in surveillance missions in complex environments in which a distributed multiple robot system is operating. In this research, task means the surveillance mission of the multiple robot system. The system-level task can be retrieved using the Reaction–Diffusion Equation on a Graph-based surveillance strategy planner. The task is the combination of observation points that the robots have to visit in order to gain complete information about the target environment. This paper contains several examples of methods used for task decomposition and allocation in surveillance tasks undertaken by multiple mobile robots. In an indoor environment, a robot group is first sent out in an exploration phase by the proposed distributed sensing and complete coverage strategy. The surveillance mission requires the iterative search of events over and over in the target environment. In the iterative surveillance operation, the robots monitor their individual coverage areas and update their local maps to account for environmental changes such as changes in position of authorized equipment, vehicles, etc. In order to quickly respond to such changes, in this research, the shortest cyclic path is aimed as a result of the iterative surveillance path. The shortest iterative surveillance path results in complete coverage of the target area at as a high a frequency as possible and maximum area covered in unit time.