Distributed Painting by a Swarm of Robots with Unlimited Sensing Capabilities and Its Simulation

Abstract

This paper presents a distributed painting algorithm for painting a priori known rectangular region by swarm of autonomous mobile robots. We assume that the region is obstacle free and of rectangular in shape. The basic approach is to divide the region into some cells, and to let each robot to paint one of these cells. Assignment of different cells to the robots is done by ranking the robots according to their relative positions. In this algorithm, the robots follow the basic Wait-Observe-Compute-Move model together with the synchronous timing model. This paper also presents a simulation of the proposed algorithm. The simulation is performed using the Player/Stage Robotic Simulator on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) platform.