TY - GEN
T1 - Multi-robot coverage with dynamic coverage information compression
AU - Wilson, Zachary
AU - Whipple, Taylor
AU - Dasgupta, Prithviraj
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - We consider the problem of distributed terrain or area coverage of an initially unknown environment using a set of mobile robots. We describe a distributed algorithm that is able to solve the distributed coverage problem without having each robot exchange its complete coverage map with other robots. The central part of our technique is a compression algorithm used by a robot to approximate the regions that have been previously covered and a fitness function that calculates the degree of accuracy of the approximated coverage information. The operation of our coverage algorithm is evaluated through experiments on simulated as well as physical Corobot robots. We have quantified the extent of overhead introduced by our coverage algorithm to prevent robots from performing repeated coverage. Overall, our results show that the robots are able to cover the environment within different environment settings while significantly reducing the amount of coverage information communicated between different robots.
AB - We consider the problem of distributed terrain or area coverage of an initially unknown environment using a set of mobile robots. We describe a distributed algorithm that is able to solve the distributed coverage problem without having each robot exchange its complete coverage map with other robots. The central part of our technique is a compression algorithm used by a robot to approximate the regions that have been previously covered and a fitness function that calculates the degree of accuracy of the approximated coverage information. The operation of our coverage algorithm is evaluated through experiments on simulated as well as physical Corobot robots. We have quantified the extent of overhead introduced by our coverage algorithm to prevent robots from performing repeated coverage. Overall, our results show that the robots are able to cover the environment within different environment settings while significantly reducing the amount of coverage information communicated between different robots.
KW - Exploration
KW - Information compression
KW - Multi-robot coverage
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=80052580094&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=80052580094&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:80052580094
SN - 9789898425751
T3 - ICINCO 2011 - Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics
SP - 236
EP - 241
BT - ICINCO 2011 - Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics
T2 - 8th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics, ICINCO 2011
Y2 - 28 July 2011 through 31 July 2011
ER -