On events in multi-robot patrol in adversarial environments

Abstract

The problem of multi-robot patrol in adversarial environments has been gaining considerable interest during the recent years.In this problem, a team of mobile robots is required to repeatedly visit some target area in order to detect penetrations that are controlled by an adversary. Little has been written so far on the nature of the event of penetration, and it is commonly assumed that the goal of the robots is to detect the penetration at any time during its occurrence.In this paper we offer a new definition of an event, with correlation to a utility function such that the detection of the event by the robots in different stages of its occurrence grants the robots a different reward. The goal of the robots is, then, to maximize their utility from detecting the event. We provide three different models of events, for which we