Multi-Robot Repeated Area Coverage: Performance Optimization Under Various Visual Ranges

We address the problem of repeated coverage of a target area, of any polygonal shape, by a team of robots having a limited visual range. Three distributed Cluster-based algorithms, and a method called Cyclic Coverage are introduced for the problem. The goal is to evaluate the performance of the repeated coverage algorithms under the effect of changes in the robots´ visual range. A comprehensive set of performance metrics are considered, including the distance the robots travel, the frequency of visiting points in the target area, and the degree of balance in workload distribution among the robots. The Cyclic Coverage approach, used as a benchmark to compare the algorithms, produces optimal or near-optimal solutions for the single robot case under some criteria. The results show that the identity of the optimal repeated coverage algorithm depends on the metric and the robots´ visual range.