Center for Embedded Network Sensing

We study the problem of exploring an unknown environment using a single robot. The environment is large enough (and possibly dynamic) that constant motion by the robot is needed to cover the environment. We term this the dynamic coverage problem. We present an efficient minimalist algorithm which assumes that global information is not available to the robot (neither a map, nor GPS). Our algorithm uses markers which the robot drops off as signposts to aid exploration. We conjecture that our algorithm has a cover time better than O(n log n), where the n markers that are deployed form the vertices of a regular graph. We provide experimental evidence in support of this conjecture. We show empirically that the performance of our algorithm on graphs is similar to its performance in simulation.