Target enclosure for multiple targets

Abstract

Target enclosure by autonomous robots is useful for many practical applications, for example, surveillance of disaster sites. Scalability is important for autonomous robots because a larger group is more robust against breakdown, accidents, and failure. However, traditional models only discussed cases in which minimum number of robots enclose a single target so that there is no way to utilize the redundant number of robots. In this paper, to achieve a highly scalable target enclosure model about the number of target to enclose, we introduce swarm based task assignment capability to Takayama et al.'s enclosure model. Our robots can enclose without any global predefined position assignments for each target,, for example, a Hamiltonian cycle, a chain structure etc.. The behavior is shown by computer simulations. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.