Real-time obstacle avoidance for manipulators and mobile robots
International Journal of Robotics Research
The electrical resistance of a graph captures its commute and cover times
STOC '89 Proceedings of the twenty-first annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
The power of a pebble: exploring and mapping directed graphs
STOC '98 Proceedings of the thirtieth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Ant algorithms for discrete optimization
Artificial Life
Terrain coverage with ant robots: a simulation study
Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Autonomous agents
Introduction to Algorithms
Efficiently searching a graph by a smell-oriented vertex process
Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
Efficient and inefficient ant coverage methods
Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
From Ants to A(ge)nts: A Special Issue on Ant-Robotics
Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
Coverage for robotics – A survey of recent results
Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
Vertex-Ant-Walk – A robust method for efficient exploration of faulty graphs
Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
Distributed coverage of rectilinear environments
Distributed coverage of rectilinear environments
Coordinate-free Coverage in Sensor Networks with Controlled Boundaries via Homology
International Journal of Robotics Research
On the capability of finite automata in 2 and 3 dimensional space
SFCS '77 Proceedings of the 18th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Ant system: optimization by a colony of cooperating agents
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics
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We propose a new `Mark-Ant-Walk' algorithm for robust and efficient covering of continuous domains by ant-like robots with very limited capabilities. The robots can mark places visited with pheromone marks and sense the level of the pheromone in their local neighborhood. In the case of multiple robots, these pheromone marks can be sensed by all robots and provide the only way of (indirect) communication between the robots. The robots are assumed to be memoryless, and to have no information besides that mentioned above. Despite the robots' simplicity we show that they are able, by running a very simple rule of behavior, to ensure efficient covering of arbitrary connected domains, including non-planar and multidimensional domains. The novelty of our algorithm lies in the fact that, unlike previously proposed methods, our algorithm works on continuous domains without relying on some induced underlying graph effectively reducing the problem to a discrete case of graph covering. In addition, we demonstrate various benefits of our algorithm such as ability to cope with arbitrary initial pheromone profile and a bounded constant time between two successive visits of the robot at the same location, making it suitable for patrolling. Finally, we provide a new theoretical bound on covering time of a wide family of such mark and walk algorithms.