A Virtual Force Interaction Scheme for Monitoring Complex Unknown Environments by Autonomous Mobile Robots

In this paper, a task of monitoring complex unknown environments by a large group of autonomous robotic agents is tackled, where it aims to find a final deployment of agents with good distribution and a large area of coverage. A novel Virtual Force Interaction Scheme (VFIS) among agents and an environment is proposed to accomplish the task. In addition to the virtual repulsive force exerted on agents for local exploitation, a new type of virtual force, vortex force, is firstly introduced for better exploration of the whole environment. In VFIS, each agent consecutively updates its position according to the varying virtual forces it bears and the final distribution is obtained after some iteration. The designed scheme has been validated in a series of experiments with different configurations successfully. Furthermore, the new structure particle swarm optimization is utilized for finding more efficient, obstacle-free trajectories from the initial positions to the final distribution after VFIS is applied.