Multi-agent Coalition Formation for Distributed Area Coverage: Analysis and Evaluation

In the multi-robot area coverage problem, a group of mobile robots have to cover an initially unknown environment using a sensor or coverage tool attached to each robot. Multi-robot area coverage is encountered in many applications of multi-robot systems including unmanned search and rescue, aerial reconnaissance, robotic demining, automatic lawn mowing, and inspection of engineering structures. We envisage that multi-robot coverage can be performed efficiently if robots are coordinated to form small teams while covering the environment. In this paper, we use a technique from coalitional game theory called a weighted voting game that allows each robot to dynamically identify other team members and form teams so that the efficiency of the area coverage operation is improved. We propose and evaluate a novel technique of computing the weights of a weighted voting game based on each robot´s coverage capability and finding the best minimal winning coalition(BMWC). Also we designed a greedy method and a heuristic method to find BMWC in O(n log n) time and O(n²) time respectively. There is a trade-off between computational time and the optimal solution.