Stigmergy-based, Dual-Layer Coverage of Unknown Indoor Regions

We present algorithms for uniformly covering an unknown indoor region with a swarm of simple, anonymous and autonomous mobile agents. The exploration of such regions is made difficult by the lack of a common global reference frame, severe degradation of radio-frequency communication, and numerous ground obstacles. We propose addressing these challenges by using airborne agents, such as Micro Air Vehicles, in dual capacity, both as mobile explorers and (once they land) as beacons that help other agents navigate the region. The algorithms we propose are designed for a swarm of simple, identical, ant-like agents with local sensing capabilities. The agents enter the region, which is discretized as a graph, over time from one or more entry points and are tasked with occupying all of its vertices. Unlike many works in this area, we consider the requirement of informing an outside operator with limited information that the coverage mission is complete. Even with this additional requirement we show, both through simulations and mathematical proofs, that the dual role concept results in linear-time termination, while also besting many well-known algorithms in the literature in terms of energy use

Distributed Systems and Mobile Computing

The book is about Distributed Systems and Mobile Computing. This is a branch of Computer Science devoted to the study of systems whose components are in different physical locations and have limited communication capabilities. Such components may be static, often organized in a network, or may be able to move in a discrete or continuous environment. The theoretical study of such systems has applications ranging from swarms of mobile robots (e.g., drones) to sensor networks, autonomous intelligent vehicles, the Internet of Things, and crawlers on the Web. The book includes five articles. Two of them are about networks: the first one studies the formation of networks by agents that interact randomly and have the ability to form connections; the second one is a study of clustering models and algorithms. The three remaining articles are concerned with autonomous mobile robots operating in continuous space. One article studies the classical gathering problem, where all robots have to reach a common location, and proposes a fast algorithm for robots that are endowed with a compass but have limited visibility. The last two articles deal with the evacuations problem, where two robots have to locate an exit point and evacuate a region in the shortest possible time