MRSAM: a Quadratically Competitive Multi-robot Online Navigation Algorithm

— We explore an online problem where a group of robots has to find a target whose position is unknown in an unknown planar environment whose geometry is acquired by the robots during task execution. The critical parameter in such a problem is the physical motion time, which, under the assumption of uniform velocity of all the robots, corresponds to length or cost of the path traveled by the robot which finds the target. The Competitiveness of an online algorithm measures its performance relative to the optimal offline solution to the problem. While competitiveness usually means constant relative performance, this paper uses generalized competitiveness, i.e. any functional relationship between online performance and optimal offline solution. Given an online task, its Competitive Complexity Class is a pair of lower and upper bounds on the competitive performance of all online algorithms for the task, such that the two bounds satisfy the same functional relationship. We classify a c...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: Shahar Sarid, Amir Shapiro, Yoav Gabriely
• Keywords: Competitive Performance, ICRA 2006, Optimal Offline Solution, Quadratic Competitive Performance, Robotics