Multi-Robot Online Terrain Coverage under Communication Range Restrictions – An Empirical Study

Communication in a multi-robot system is vital as it facilitates coordination. The performance of a multi-robot system improves with coordination. Many state-of-the-art approaches ignore intermittent connectivity, which is inevitable due to communication range restrictions. In this paper, the assumption of global communication is dropped, and the robots are restricted to communicate in a pre-specified communication range as in a realistic scenario. A comparative empirical study of five different state-of-the-art approaches which assume that the communication is omnipresent is conducted. The performance of each algorithm is evaluated by varying the communication range with a different sized robot team both in simulation and on a physical multi-robot test-bed. Finally, the impact of communication range restrictions on the performance of the approaches under evaluation is discussed.