Patrolling a Region with a Structured Swarm of Robots with Limited Individual Capabilities

We present methods for patrolling and surveillance in an environment with a distributed swarm of robots with limited capabilities. We make use of a distributed triangulation of the work space, in which a set of n stationary sensors provides coverage control; in addition, there are k mobile robots that can move between the sensors. Building on our prior work on structured exploration of unknown spaces with multi-robot systems, we can make use of a triangulation that is constructed in a distributed fashion and guarantees good local navigation properties, even when sensors and robots have very limited capabilities. This physical data structure allows triangles to sense, compute, and communicate the information required to guide navigating robots while circulating in the region. We present: 1) A description of a real-world robot platform (the r-one robots) with limited capabilities that allows coverage, communication and mobility 2) A summary of how to achieve coverage by building a triangulation of the workspace, and the ensuing properties. 3) A description of a simple local policy (LRV, for Least Recently Visited) for achieving coverage by the patrolling robots. 4) A description of a alternative local policy (AR, for Age Rank) that identifies important vertices, thus ensuring smaller refresh times for those, and allowing more flexible response to events. 5) Experimental results for both policies.