A Decentralized Strategy for Multirobot Sampling/Patrolling: Theory and Experiments

This brief presents a decentralized coordinated strategy for multirobot patrolling missions. Patrolling is here interpreted within the framework of the sampling problem. To be applied in practice, several realistic constraints and the time/spatial variance of the information are explicitly considered. The proposed approach is well rooted in the concepts of Voronoi tessellations and Gaussian Processes. Each robot, based only on local information, computes the next point to visit according to a given performance criteria. Numerical simulations and experiments involving three autonomous marine surface robots in a harbor scenario at the Parque Expo site in Lisbon, Portugal, are presented.