Multirobot Cooperative Patrolling Strategy for Moving Objects

In multirobot patrolling problems, various dynamic situations require a higher level of cooperation among robots. The dynamic problems caused by moving objects are rarely studied yet. This work proposes a distributed event-driven cooperative strategy for multirobot systems to patrol moving objects autonomously. First, forward and backward utility functions are defined as criteria for robots to conduct two-way evaluation when they choose their targets to patrol. Then, three event types and a cooperative action considering energy consumption and visiting frequency comprehensively are proposed to improve coordination among robots during their execution processes. In simulation experiments, the proposed strategy shows significant advantages on decreasing the average and maximum unvisited time of moving objects compared with the state-of-the-art. A marine pollution monitoring case is simulated to demonstrate the practicability of this strategy.