Obstacle Prone Area Coverage by Swarm of Mobile Robots with Limited Visibility

Abstract

This paper studies a distributed coverage algorithm of a bounded rectangular region in the presence of horizontal line obstacles by an autonomous swarm of asynchronous mobile robots. They follow the basic Look-Compute-Move model, formally known as the CORDA model. The robot has no prior knowledge about the internal environment of the target region, especially the number and location of the robots, as well as obstacles. Robots are assumed to be anonymous, small, identical, simple, oblivious, inexpensive, and non-communicating in nature. The robots have a limited range of visibility. The robots unanimously decompose the whole region into several non-overlapping horizontal strips, where each robot is responsible for painting at most two strips based on its initial position. The painting of the entire region is achieved within finite time without any collision and repetition.