Multi-robot Deployment using Topological Maps

This paper proposes an efficient and distributed deployment strategy to optimally distribute teams of robots in environments that can be represented by topological maps. Among the several applications of our solution are sensing and coverage of large corridor-based buildings, such as hospitals and schools, and the optimal placement of service vehicles in the streets of a big city. The representation of the environment as a topological map transforms the original two or three-dimensional problem into a one-dimensional, simplified problem, thus reducing the computational cost of the solution. Moreover, each robot can reach its final position by simply following a sequence of intuitive, human-like commands, without the need for global metric localization, which also simplifies robot control. Besides presenting convergence proofs for our method, the paper also presents simulated and real world experiments that illustrate and validate our approach.