Self-organizing robotic system for area coverage and surround of contamination found

Abstract

The paper introduces the multi-robot area coverage problem, wherein a group of robots must inspect every point of a 2-dimensional test environment and surround all contaminations (or enemies) found. Self-organizing robotic systems are able to accomplish complex tasks in a changing environment, using local interactions among individual agents and local environment without an external global control. Our interest in this area is motivated by an involvement in a project with a goal to solve tasks of difficult area coverage and surveillance by a large team of small autonomous robots. In the paper, the architecture to achieve this is described, and some of the initial simulation results are presented.