Covering a continuous domain by distributed, limited robots

Abstract

We present an algorithm for covering continuous domains by primitive robots whose only ability is to mark visited places with pheromone and to sense the level of the pheromone in their neighborhood. These pheromone marks can be sensed by all robots and thus provide a way for indirect communication between the robots. Apart from this, the robots have no means to communicate. Additionally they are memoryless, have no global information such as the domain map, own position, coverage percentage, etc. Despite the robots' simplicity, we show that they are able to cover efficiently any connected domains, including non-planar ones. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.