Persistent Monitoring of Multiple Areas of Interest with Robotic Swarms

The use of autonomous agents in a vast range of tasks such as exploration, surveillance and environmental monitoring has significantly increased in recent years. In this context, depending on the embedded sensor suite, information such as temperature, humidity, and even sound and images can be acquired. In this paper, we have developed an approach that is able to search and monitor areas of interest using a robotic swarm which is divided into subgroups. Our approach explores the cooperation among agents to simultaneously monitor several areas of interest that may be considerably larger than the sensing area of a single agent. Our methodology was evaluated through several experiments in a simulated environment. Experimental results have shown that the use of multiple agents working cooperatively allows the algorithm developed to achieve results similar to those obtained by an approach that uses a global view of the workspace.