5,565 research outputs found
Algorithms for Rapidly Dispersing Robot Swarms in Unknown Environments
We develop and analyze algorithms for dispersing a swarm of primitive robots
in an unknown environment, R. The primary objective is to minimize the
makespan, that is, the time to fill the entire region. An environment is
composed of pixels that form a connected subset of the integer grid.
There is at most one robot per pixel and robots move horizontally or
vertically at unit speed. Robots enter R by means of k>=1 door pixels
Robots are primitive finite automata, only having local communication, local
sensors, and a constant-sized memory.
We first give algorithms for the single-door case (i.e., k=1), analyzing the
algorithms both theoretically and experimentally. We prove that our algorithms
have optimal makespan 2A-1, where A is the area of R.
We next give an algorithm for the multi-door case (k>1), based on a
wall-following version of the leader-follower strategy. We prove that our
strategy is O(log(k+1))-competitive, and that this bound is tight for our
strategy and other related strategies.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, Latex, to appear in Workshop on Algorithmic
Foundations of Robotics, 200
Stigmergic MASA: A Stigmergy Based Algorithm for Multi-Target Search
International audienceWe explore the on-line problem of coverage where multiple agents have to find a target whose position is unknown, and without a prior global information about the environment. In this paper a novel algorithm for multi-target search is described, it is inspired from water vortex dynamics and based on the principle of pheromone-based communication. According to this algorithm, called Stigmergic MASA (for "Multi Ant Search Area"), the agents search nearby their base incrementally using turns around their center and around each other, until the target is found, with only a group of simple distributed cooperative Ant like agents, which communicate indirectly via depositing/detecting markers. This work improves the search performance in comparison with pure random walks, we show the obtained results using computer simulations
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