A framework for multi-robot node coverage in sensor networks

Area coverage is a well-known problem in robotics. Extensive research has been conducted for the single robot coverage problem in the past decades. More recently, the research community has focused its attention on formulations where multiple robots are considered. In this paper, a new formulation of the multi-robot coverage problem is proposed. The novelty of this work is the introduction of a sensor network, which cooperates with the team of robots in order to provide coordination. The sensor network, taking advantage of its distributed nature, is responsible for both the construction of the path and for guiding the robots. The coverage of the environment is achieved by guaranteeing the reachability of the sensor nodes by the robots. Two distributed algorithms for path construction are discussed. The first aims to speed up the construction process exploiting a concurrent approach. The second aims to provide an underlying structure for the paths by building a Hamiltonian path and then partitioning it. A statistical analysis has been performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. In particular, three different indexes of quality, namely completeness, fairness, and robustness, have been studied.