On redundancy, efficiency, and robustness in coverage for multiple robots

13 years 4 months ago

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Motivated by potential efficiency and robustness gains, there is growing interest in the use of multiple robots for coverage. In coverage, robots visit every point in a target area, at least once. Previous investigations of multi-robot coverage focus on completeness of the coverage, and on eliminating redundancy, but do not formally address robustness. Moreover, a common assumption is that elimination of redundancy leads to improved efficiency (coverage time). We address robustness and efficiency in a novel family of multi-robot coverage algorithms, based on spanning-tree coverage of approximate cell decomposition of the work area. We analytically show that the algorithms are robust, in that as long as a single robot is able to move, the coverage will be completed. We also show that non-redundant (non-backtracking) versions of the algorithms have a worst-case coverage time virtually identical to that of a single robot--thus no performance gain is guaranteed in non-redundant coverage. ...

Noam Hazon, Gal A. Kaminka

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