Experimental Evaluation of Multi-Robot Online Terrain Coverage Approach

This paper presents a empirical evaluation of some approaches suggested in the literature for solving the online terrain coverage task. Our first contribution is that, we have implemented in simulation four state-of-the-art approaches. The first two approaches are based on structured trajectories and use backtracking mechanism for task allocation. The other two are based on the behavior of ants. Also, we have modified one of the state-of-the-art approaches and improved its performance in terms of computation time. The second contribution is that, we have developed a practical test-bed comprising of multiple differential drive robots that are able to coordinate with each other in a distributed fashion by wirelessly communicating with their team-mates. We have implemented the representative set of approaches on our test-bed. The same test-bed can be leveraged for validating multi-robot coordination approaches for solving other tasks like patrolling, foraging, etc.