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Cooperative “Swarm Cleaning” of Stationary Domains

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Swarms and Network Intelligence in Search

Part of the book series: Studies in Computational Intelligence ((SCI,volume 729))

Abstract

In this work we analyze the behavior of a swarm of autonomous robotic agents, or drones, designed for cooperatively exploring an unknown area (for purposes of cleaning, painting, etc.). We assume that each robot can acquire only the information which is available in its immediate vicinity, and the only way of inter-robot communication is by leaving traces on the common ground and sensing the traces left by other robots. We present a protocol for cleaning a dirty area that guarantees task completion (unless all robots die) and prove an upper bound on the time complexity of this protocol. We also show simulation results of the protocol on several types of regions. These simulations indicate that the precise cleaning time depends on the number of robots, their initial locations, and the shape of the dirty region.

This chapter is based on work previously published in parts in [3, 9, 12].

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It should be stated that although the memory size of the agents is completely independent w.r.t to size of the problem, it is still \(O(\log k)\) bits w.r.t to the number of agents (used for counting purposes).

  2. 2.

    This is a simple consequence of the “rotation index” Theorem (see e.g. [20] p. 396): If \(\alpha : [0,1] \rightarrow R^{2}\) is a plane, regular, simple, closed curve, then \(\int _{0}^{1}k(s)ds = 2 \pi \), where k(s) is the curvature of \(\alpha (s)\) and the curve is traversed in the positive direction.

  3. 3.

    The existence of a non-critical point is guaranteed since \(\partial F_{t}\) is a connected graph and thus has a spanning tree, in which at least two tiles has a degree of 1, which makes them non-critical tiles.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Yaniv Altshuler & Alex Pentland

  2. Computer Science Department, Israeli Institute of Technology (Technion), Haifa, Israel

    Alfred M. Bruckstein

Authors
  1. Yaniv Altshuler
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  2. Alex Pentland
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  3. Alfred M. Bruckstein
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Correspondence to Yaniv Altshuler .

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Altshuler, Y., Pentland, A., Bruckstein, A.M. (2018). Cooperative “Swarm Cleaning” of Stationary Domains. In: Swarms and Network Intelligence in Search. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 729. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63604-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63604-7_2

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