Coverage control of a robotic swarm for pollution monitoring

Abstract

This paper presents a simple and easy-to-implement decentralized algorithm inspired by human move-and-see behavior for a swarm of autonomous mobile robots to achieve area coverage for environmental pollution monitoring. Specifically, robots relocate themselves independently from each other according to the pollution intensity and coveredness (or occupiedness) of an area within their limited sensing range. Simulation results show that the proposed decentralized algorithm enables a swarm of mobile robots to localize and contain the pollution sources in an efficient manner even in conditions where multiple pollution sources exist. Compared with the existing Voronoi-based approaches, the proposed algorithm improves the convergence time significantly.