Modeling multiple robot systems for area coverage and cooperation

This paper presents a distributed model for cooperative multiple mobile robot systems. In a multiple robot system, each mobile robot has sensing, computation and communication capabilities. The mobile robots spread out across certain area and share sensory information through an ad hoc wireless network. The multiple mobile robot system is therefore a mobile sensor network. In this paper, Voronoi diagram and Delaunay triangulation are introduced to model the area coverage and cooperation of mobile sensor networks. Based on the model, this paper discusses a fault tolerant algorithm for autonomous deployment of the mobile robots. The algorithm enables the system to reconfigure itself such that the area covered by the system can be enlarged. The proposed formation control algorithm allows the mobile sensor network to track moving target and sweep a larger area along specified paths.