Multi Robot Surveillance and Planning in Limited Communication Environments
V. Inna Kedege (Student TU Delft)
A.T. Czechowski (TU Delft - Interactive Intelligence)
Ludo Stellingwerff (Almende B.V.)
F.A. Oliehoek (TU Delft - Interactive Intelligence)
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Abstract
Distributed robots that survey and assist with search & rescue operations usually deal with unknown environments with limited communication. This paper focuses on distributed & cooperative multi-robot area coverage strategies of unknown environments, having constrained communication. Due to restricted communication there is performance loss for the multi-robot team, in terms of increased number of steps to cover an area. From simulation results, it is shown that enabling partial communication amongst robots can recover a significant amount of performance by decreasing the number of steps required for area coverage. Additionally it is found that partially communicating robots that predict the paths of peers do not perform significantly different from robots that are only partially communicating. This is found due to predictions spreading the robots away from one another, which reduces meeting times and instances of inter-robot data sharing.