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This paper addresses the complete area coverage problem of a known environment by multiple-robots. Complete area coverage is the problem of moving an end-effector over all available space while avoiding existing obstacles. In such tasks, using multiple robots can increase the efficiency of the area coverage in terms of minimizing the operational time and increase the robustness in the face of robot attrition. Unfortunately, the problem of finding an optimal solution for such an area coverage problem with multiple robots is known to be NP-complete. In this paper we present two approximation heuristics for solving the multi-robot coverage problem. The first solution presented is a direct extension of an efficient single robot area coverage algorithm, based on an exact cellular decomposition. The second algorithm is a greedy approach that divides the area into equal regions and applies an efficient single-robot coverage algorithm to each region. We present experimental results for two algorithms. Results indicate that our approaches provide good coverage distribution between robots and minimize the workload per robot, meanwhile ensuring complete coverage of the area.
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Efficient Algorithms for Optimal Perimeter Guarding
We investigate the problem of optimally assigning a large number of robots (or other types of autonomous agents) to guard the perimeters of closed 2D regions, where the perimeter of each region to be guarded may contain multiple disjoint polygonal chains. Each robot is responsible for guarding a subset of a perimeter and any point on a perimeter must be guarded by some robot. In allocating the robots, the main objective is to minimize the maximum 1D distance to be covered by any robot along the boundary of the regions. For this optimization problem which we call optimal perimeter guarding (OPG), thorough structural analysis is performed, which is then exploited to develop fast exact algorithms that run in guaranteed low polynomial time. In addition to formal analysis and proofs, experimental evaluations and simulations are performed that further validate the correctness and effectiveness of our algorithmic results.
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- PAR ID:
- 10111592
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Robotics: science and systems
- ISSN:
- 2330-7668
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.15607/RSS.2019.XV.002
