Dynamic decentralized area partitioning for cooperating cleaning robots

Abstract

If multiple cleaning robots are used to cooperatively clean a larger room, e.g. an airport, the room must be partitioned among the robots. The paper describes a dynamic and decentralized method to partition a certain area among multiple robots. The area is divided into polygons, which are allocated by the robots. After a robot has been allocated a certain polygon, it is responsible for cleaning the polygon. The method described in the paper does not need any global synchronization and does not require a global communication network.