Publications Details
Exhaustive geographic search with mobile robots along space-filling curves
Swarms of mobile robots can be tasked with searching a geographic region for targets of interest, sttch as buried land mines. We assume that the individual robots are equipped with sensors tuned to the targets of intercsi, that these sensors have limited range, and that the robots can communicate wilh one auolher to ennble conperatio,. I low can a swarm of cooperating sensate robols efficiently search a given geographic region far targets in lhe absence of a priori information about the targets' locations? Many of the “obvious” approaches are inefficient or lack robustness. One efficient approach is to have the robots traverse a spacefilling curve. For many geographic search applications, this method is energy-frugal, highly robust, and provides guaranteed coverage in a finite time that decreases as the reciprocal of the number of robots sharing the search task. Furthermore, control is inherently decentralized and requires very little robot-to-robot communication for the robots to organize their movements. This report presents some preliminary results from applying the Hilbert space-filling curve to geographic search by mobile robots.