Continuous surveillance of a spatial region using distributed robots and sensors is a well-studied application in the area of multi-agent systems. This paper investigates a practically-relevant scenario where robotic sensors are introduced asynchronously and inter-robot communication is discrete, event-driven, local and asynchronous. Furthermore, we work with lazy robots; i.e., the robots seek to minimize their area of responsibility by equipartitioning the domain to be covered. We adapt a well-known algorithm which is practicable and known to generally work well for coverage problems. For a specially chosen geometry of the spatial domain, we show that there exists a non-trivial sequence of inter-robot communication events which leads to an instantaneous loss of coverage when the number of robots exceeds a certain threshold. The same sequence of events preserves coverage and, further, leads to an equipartition of the domain when the number of robots is smaller than the threshold. This result demonstrates that coverage guarantees for a given algorithm might be sensitive to the number of robots and, therefore, may not scale in obvious ways. It also suggests that when such algorithms are to be verified and validated prior to field deployment, the number of robots or sensors used in test scenarios should match that deployed on the field.
翻译:使用分布式机器人和传感器对空间区域进行连续监视,是多试剂系统领域一项研究周密的应用。本文调查了一种实际相关的情景,即机器人传感器是非同步的,机器人之间的通信是离散的、事件驱动的、局部的和无同步的。此外,我们与懒惰的机器人合作;即机器人试图通过配置所覆盖域来尽量减少其责任范围;我们调整了一种众所周知的、在覆盖问题方面可行而且一般已知运作良好的算法。对于特别选择的空间域几何学来说,我们表明存在着一种非三轨的机器人间通信事件,在机器人数量超过某一阈值时导致即刻丧失覆盖范围。同样的事件序列保留了覆盖范围,并导致在机器人数量小于阈值时对域进行配置。这一结果表明,对某种特定算法的保障可能敏感于机器人的数量,因此可能不以明显的方式进行规模的测量。我们还表明,在机器人数量上部署的甚高频传感器在现场进行校验时,应当将所部署的甚先验验的甚测测。