Title
Multirobot Forest Coverage for Weighted and Unweighted Terrain
Abstract
One of the main applications of mobile robots is coverage: visiting each location in known terrain. Coverage is crucial for lawn mowing, cleaning, harvesting, search-and-rescue, intrusion detection, and mine clearing. Naturally, coverage can be sped up with multiple robots. However, we show that solving several versions of multirobot coverage problems with minimal cover times is NP-hard, which provides motivation for designing polynomial-time constant-factor approximation algorithms. We then describe multirobot forest coverage (MFC), a new polynomial-time multirobot coverage algorithm based on an algorithm by Even et al. [Min-max tree covers of graphs. Oper. Res. Lett., vol. 32, pp. 309-315, 2004] for finding a tree cover with trees of balanced weights. Our theoretical results show that the cover times of MFC in weighted and unweighted terrain are at most about a factor of 16 larger than minimal. Our simulation results show that the cover times of MFC are close to minimal in all tested scenarios and smaller than the cover times of an alternative multirobot coverage algorithm.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1109/TRO.2010.2072271
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Keywords
Field
DocType
Polynomials,Robot sensing systems,Approximation algorithms,Algorithm design and analysis,Approximation methods,Terrain factors
Approximation algorithm,Mathematical optimization,Tree (graph theory),Algorithm design,Terrain,Spanning tree,Time complexity,Intrusion detection system,Mobile robot,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
26
6
1552-3098
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
25
0.97
27
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xiaoming Zheng11247.38
Sven Koenig23125361.22
David Kempe35891403.41
Sonal Jain41489.29