Coordination in a multi-robot surveillance application using Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Cooperative robots and their integration with Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is an expanding area that still deserves significant research efforts. This paper presents a multi-robot surveillance application supported by a WSN. We investigate the problem of multi-robot coordination for target tracking and capturing. One key distinction of our problem model is to consider a WSN that supports the mission of the multi-robot team. We devised three mechanisms: centralized, distributed and market-based algorithms, which were extensively evaluated under the Player/Stage simulator. Simulation results show that the centralized approach is the most likely solution able to maintain an efficient system cost.