A new approach to multi-robot harbour patrolling: Theory and experiments

This paper describes a decentralized coordination strategy for multi robot patrolling missions. To this effect, the theory of Gaussian Processes (usually used for estimation purposes) is suitably adapted to tackle the problem of harbour patrolling. The introduction of a time varying dependency in the probabilistic formulation (thus allowing for the sampled field to be dynamic, i.e., changing in time) makes the proposed solution suitable for the type of mission considered. Moreover, the advantages of Voronoi tessellations are exploited to automatically distribute the vehicles over the environment. The resulting algorithm takes into account several constraints and can be tailored based on the communication and computational capabilities of the robots, thus making it suitable for heterogeneous systems. Numerical simulations and experiments involving three autonomous marine surface vehicles in a harbour scenario at the Parque Expo site in Lisbon are discussed.