Area Coverage Assessment and Optimisation by Mesh-Connected Mobile Robots

This study presents a novel approach for managing out-of-the-box multi-mobile robotic systems designed to optimise area coverage and maintain wireless mesh connectivity. We introduce an area coverage assessment scheme that enables robot swarms to adjust their numbers dynamically, enabling real-time monitoring of dynamically changing environments with sufficient robots. Through decentralized control, the robots adapt to the environment size and geometry without prior environmental knowledge while maintaining ad-hoc connectivity by regulating inter-robot distances. Simulation results validate the system’s scalability and demonstrate its capability to achieve efficient area coverage with a self-regulated swarm size. This technology has broad applications, ranging from real-time inventory management in intralogistics to urban monitoring in smart cities and rapid disaster relief.