COVER: A Cooperative Virtual Force Robot Deployment Technique

We present a Cooperative Virtual Force Robot Deployment (COVER) technique. Virtual force (VF) technique appears as one of the prominent approaches to perform multi-robot deployment autonomously. However, most of the existing VF based approaches lack purposeful deployment. Our approach modifies the original VF approach to overcome this problem and considers the mission requirements such as the number of required robots in each locality (e.g., landmarks are distributed and each needs a specific number of robots in its vicinity). In addition, COVER expedites the deployment process by establishing a cooperative relation between robots and neighboring landmarks. Extensive simulation experiments have been carried out to assess the performance of COVER along with Hungarian deployment method (a centralized approach), the basic virtual force (BVF) and other recent proposed variations. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of COVER for several performance factors such as total travelled distance, total exchanged messages and total deployment time.