Distributed Coordination of Networked Robots for Perimeter Surveillance Tasks

Perimeter surveillance is a relevant task which can be performed in a more efficient manner using multiple robots than a single robot. This chapter addresses the perimeter surveillance tasks using a team of heterogeneous robots and assuming limited communications conditions and zones with different priorities. A partitioning strategy, where the whole perimeter is divided in segments and these segments are assigned to the different robots, is proposed. The robots patrol their assigned segments, while keeps at least periodic connectivity between them. The refresh time is used as criterion to optimize each zone surveillance, while an urgency criterion is proposed to allocate dynamically the robots among the zones based on their priorities. Different algorithms and protocols based on the coordination variables and the one-to-one coordination are proposed to coordinate the robots to converge to the desired partitioning strategy in a distributed manner. The presented system is fully decentralized and distributed, robots converge to a cooperative behavior from local decisions. A set of experimental and simulated results are provided to test, analyze and compare the convergence, efficiency, scalability and robustness of the proposed solutions.

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