Techniques in Multi-Robot Area Coverage

Swarm of mobile robots is actually a large number of small robots imitating the behavior of social insects that perform certain tasks in a group. This chapter considers the problem of area coverage by a swarm of mobile robots. Initially, the robots occupy random positions in a target area. The objective is to physically cover/scan each accessible location of that area by at least one robot of the swarm. After discussing, in brief, different models and their challenges this chapter summarizes the research works carried out to solve this problem. The existing literature is classified into two categories, namely, team based approach and individual approach. The pros and cons of both the approaches are indicated and finally a comparative study of the addressed works in terms of computational model, synchrony, characteristics of robots, etc. is presented.