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Multirobot systems for covering environments are increasingly used inapplications like cleaning, industrial inspection, patrolling, and precisionagriculture. The problem of covering a given environment using multiple robotscan be naturally formulated and studied as a multi-Traveling SalespersonProblem (mTSP). In a mTSP, the environment is represented as a graph and thegoal is to find tours (starting and ending at the same depot) for the robots inorder to visit all the vertices with minimum global cost, namely the length ofthe longest tour. The mTSP is an NP-hard problem for which severalapproximation algorithms have been proposed. These algorithms usually assumegeneric environments, but tighter approximation bounds can be reached focusingon specific environments. In this paper, we address the case of environmentscomposed of sub-parts, called modules, that can be reached from each other onlythrough some linking structures. Examples are multi-floor buildings, in whichthe modules are the floors and the linking structures are the staircases or theelevators, and floors of large hotels or hospitals, in which the modules arethe rooms and the linking structures are the corridors. We focus on linearmodular environments, with the modules organized sequentially, presenting anefficient (with polynomial worst-case time complexity) algorithm that finds asolution for the mTSP whose cost is within a bounded distance from the cost ofthe optimal solution. The main idea of our algorithm is to allocate disjoint"blocks" of adjacent modules to the robots, in such a way that each module iscovered by only one robot. We experimentally compare our algorithm against somestate-of-the-art algorithms for solving mTSPs in generic environments and showthat it is able to provide solutions with lower makespan and spending acomputing time several orders of magnitude shorter.

Multirobot Coverage of Linear Modular Environments