Covering an Unknown Area with an RFID-Enabled Robot Swarm
Andres Puusepp, Tanel Tammet, Enar Reilent · Applied Mechanics and Materials · 2014
Our goal is to improve the coverage of an area using robots with simple sensors and simple, robust algorithms usable for any kind of room. We investigate the advantage of the swarm - compared to a single robot - and three different algorithms for the task of searching landmarks in a previously unknown area. The guidance of the robot is based on landmarks, implemented by RFID tags irregularly placed in the room. The experiments are conducted using a custom made simulator of RFID-equipped Roomba cleaning robots, based on our previous work with real-life Roomba swarms. We show that for the simple room coverage algorithms the speedup gained from increasing the size of the swarm diminishes as the swarm grows and most importantly, for larger swarm sizes the information available and the intelligence of the algorithm becomes less important.