Cost-based cooperative strategy to search mobile evader in roadmap based environment

This paper presents a cooperative approach of searching an evading target with multiple mobile robots in roadmap based environment. In our solution, robots are only able to move through the road and target can move to any reachable area in the environment. The searching robots have a sensor with a half-circular footprint which allows it to detect any evader within the sensor radius. The solution has two steps. The first problem is to determine a virtual boundary and the number of robots to search the virtual boundary while ensuring that the target will be inside the virtual boundary till the search is over. The second problem is to search the virtual boundary. We proposed a cost-based online search path planner to solve the searching problem. Implementation of our technique in simulator shows that it can efficiently and robustly search the virtual boundary.