Chaotic vs. random coverage missions

This paper presents a new approach on how to use the specific properties of chaotic attractors for the coordination of mobile robots. The specific properties of a chaotic system used here are the exponential divergence on the attractor and the attractor itself. On chaotic attractors the trajectories diverge exponentially, but stay within the limits of the attractor. The state space of the chaotic attractor is projected to the mission space of the robots. The divergence is appropriate to a fast distribution of the robots in an area. After a leading divergence the average distance between the robots stays nearly constant. Taking the attractor coverage time it is shown that the proposed chaotic movement for small discretization is in principle superior to random movement.