Effective Area Partitioning in a Multi-Agent Patrolling Domain for Better Efficiency

This study proposes a cooperative method for a multi-agent continuous cooperative patrolling problem by partitioning the environment into a number of subareas so that the workload is balanced among multiple agents by allocating subareas to individual agents. Owing to the advancement in robotics and information technology over the years, robots are being utilized in many applications. As environments are usually vast and complicated, a single robot (agent) cannot supervise the entire work. Thus, cooperative work by multiple agents, even though complicated, is indispensable. This study focuses on cooperation in a bottom-up manner by fairly partitioning the environment into subareas, and employing each agent to work on them as its responsibility. However, as the agents do not monitor the entire environment, the decentralized control may generate unreasonable shapes of subareas; the area are often unnecessarily divided into fragmented enclaves, resulting in inefficiency. Our proposed method reduced the number of small and isolated enclaves by negotiation. Our experimental results indicated that our method eliminated the minute/unnecessary fragmented enclaves and improved performance when compared with the results obtained by conventional methods.