As mobile robots become increasingly autonomous over extended periods of time, opportunities arise for their use on repetitive tasks. We define and implement behaviors for a class of such tasks that we call emphcontinuous area sweeping tasks. A continuous area sweeping task is one in which a group of robots must repeatedly visit all points in a fixed area, possibly with non-uniform frequency, as specified by a task-dependent cost function. Examples of problems that need continuous area sweeping are trash removal in a large building and routine surveillance. In our previous work we have introduced a single-robot approach to this problem. In this paper, we extend that approach to multi-robot scenarios. The focus of this paper is adaptive and decentralized task assignment in continuous area sweeping problems, with the aim of ensuring stability in environments with dynamic factors, such as robot malfunctions or the addition of new robots to the team. Our proposed negotiation-based approach is fully implemented and tested both in simulation and on physical robots.

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In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 1724-1729, May 2006.

@InProceedings{ICRA06, title={A Multi-Robot System for Continuous Area Sweeping Tasks}, author={Mazda Ahmadi and Peter Stone}, booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation}, month={May}, pages={1724-1729}, url="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai-lab?ICRA06", year={2006} }