Cooperative Robot Deployment: Simulation and Real Experimental Analysis

Autonomous robot deployment is very attracting feature especially inside unknown area. Virtual force (VF) technique appears as one of the prominent approaches to performing multirobot deployment autonomously. However, most of the existing VF-based approaches lack purposeful deployment. In this work, we present a Cooperative Virtual Force Robot Deployment (COVER) technique. Our approach modifies the original VF approach to overcome this problem and considers the mission requirements such as the number of required robots in each locality (e.g., landmarks are distributed, and each needs a specific number of robots in its vicinity). In addition, COVER expedites the deployment process by establishing a cooperative relation between robots and neighboring landmarks. Extensive simulation experiments have been carried out to assess the performance of COVER along with Hungarian deployment method (a centralized approach), the basic virtual force, and full virtual force. A proof of concept experiment using TurtleBot robots is presented as well to show real implementation of COVER. The simulation and experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of COVER for several performance factors such as total traveled distance, total exchanged messages, and total deployment time.