Robots’ Cooperation for Finding a Target in Streets

Abstract : We study the problem of finding a target t from a start point s in street environments with the cooperation of two robots which have a minimal sensing capability; that is, robots do not know any information about the workspace including information on distances, edges, coordinates, angles etc. They just can detect the discontinuities in the visibility region of their location. The robots can detect target point t as soon as it enters their visibility region and have communication peripherals to send messages to each other. Our aim is to minimize the length of the path passed by the robots. We propose an online algorithm for robots such that they move in the workspace and find the target. This algorithm generates a search path from a start point s to a target point t such that the distance traveled by the robots is at most 2 times longer than the shortest path. Also, we prove that this ratio is tight.