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Cooperative Multi-robot Patrol in an Indoor Infrastructure

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Human Behavior Understanding in Networked Sensing

Abstract

Multi-robot patrol (MRP) is essentially a collective decision-making problem, where mobile robotic units must coordinate their actions effectively in order to schedule visits to every critical point of the environment. The problem is commonly addressed using centralized planners with global knowledge and/or calculating a priori routes for all robots before the beginning of the mission. However, distributed strategies for MRP have very interesting advantages, such as allowing the team to adapt to changes in the system, the possibility to add or remove patrol units during the mission, and leading to trajectories that are much harder to predict by an external observer. In this work, we present a distributed strategy to solve the patrolling problem in a real world indoor environment, where each autonomous agent decides its actions locally and adapts to the system’s needs using distributed communication. Experimental results show the ability of the team to coordinate so as to visit every important point of the environment. Furthermore, the approach is able to scale to an arbitrary number of robots as well as overcome communication failures and robot faults.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Available at http://www.ros.org/wiki/wifi_comm.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by a Ph.D. grant (SFRH/BD/64426/2009), the CHOPIN research project (PTDC/EEA-CRO/119000/2010), and the Institute of Systems and Robotics (project Est-C/EEI/UI0048/2011), all of them funded by the Portuguese science agency “Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Systems and Robotics (ISR), University of Coimbra (UC), 3030-290, Coimbra, Portugal

    David Portugal & Rui P. Rocha

Authors
  1. David Portugal
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  2. Rui P. Rocha
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Correspondence to David Portugal .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Research Council, Lecce, Lecce, Italy

    Paolo Spagnolo

  2. National Research Council, Lecce, Lecce, Italy

    Pier Luigi Mazzeo

  3. National Research Council, Lecce, Lecce, Italy

    Cosimo Distante

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Portugal, D., Rocha, R.P. (2014). Cooperative Multi-robot Patrol in an Indoor Infrastructure. In: Spagnolo, P., Mazzeo, P., Distante, C. (eds) Human Behavior Understanding in Networked Sensing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10807-0_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10807-0_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-10806-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-10807-0

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