Motion Coordination of Swarm Robots for Mobile Target Search

摘要

With the rapid advancement of robotics technologies, a group of robots are able to communicate with one another by wireless transmissions and form a robot swarm. Robot swarm has many applications and a typical one is target search in which swarm robots are sent to places that might be dangerous for human workers, and they coordinate with one another to search for targets such as survivors in a disaster. However, motion coordination of swarm robots for target search has received little attention especially when the targets are mobile. In this work, we develop a motion coordination algorithm for swarm robots to search for targets in an unknown area. Our basic idea is to divide the search area into grids and build a gray-scale map in which each grid is associated with a gray scale indicating the efficiency of searching targets in this grid. The Voronoi diagram is adopted to coordinate swarm robots to search different portions of the search area for maximizing search efficiency. By theoretical analysis, our motion coordination algorithm is validated to ensure that all static targets are guaranteed to be found. We derive an upper-bound on the total time for robots to traverse all the grids in the search area. Extensive simulations are conducted and the results show that the proposed motion coordination algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art and achieves a success rate of over 90% in finding all mobile targets with low search latency.