### Persistent Robotic Tasks: Monitoring and Sweeping in Changing Environments

@article{smith_persistent_2012,
title = {Persistent {Robotic} {Tasks}: {Monitoring} and {Sweeping} in {Changing} {Environments}},
volume = {28},
issn = {1552-3098, 1941-0468},
url = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6101584/},
abstract = {In this paper, we present controllers that enable mobile robots to persistently monitor or sweep a changing environment. The environment is modeled as a ﬁeld that is deﬁned over a ﬁnite set of locations. The ﬁeld grows linearly at locations that are not within the range of a robot and decreases linearly at locations that are within range of a robot. We assume that the robots travel on given closed paths. The speed of each robot along its path is controlled to prevent the ﬁeld from growing unbounded at any location. We consider the space of speed controllers that are parametrized by a ﬁnite set of basis functions. For a single robot, we develop a linear program that computes a speed controller in this space to keep the ﬁeld bounded, if such a controller exists. Another linear program is derived to compute the speed controller that minimizes the maximum ﬁeld value over the environment. We extend our linear program formulation to develop a multirobot controller that keeps the ﬁeld bounded. We characterize, both theoretically and in simulation, the robustness of the controllers to modeling errors and to stochasticity in the environment.},
language = {en},
number = {2},
urldate = {2020-09-15},
journal = {IEEE Transactions on Robotics},
author = {Smith, Stephen L. and Schwager, Mac and Rus, Daniela},
month = apr,
year = {2012},
keywords = {Multi-Agent Control, Multi-Agent Search, Optimization and Optimal Control, Persistent Surveillance, persistent\_surveillance},
pages = {410--426},
month_numeric = {4}
}