A Virtual Force-Based Strategy for Multi-robot Target Search

In this paper, the mission of deploying a specific number of robotic agents autonomously is focused, where it aims to fast travel close to target landmarks to satisfy the demand in some emergency scenarios. A virtual force-based approach for target search is proposed to achieve this objective. Utilizing the virtual force exerted upon agents by other communicated agents, targets and their historical positions, the agents could spread themselves fast and speed up the deployment procedure. To ensure full demand satisfaction of targets, the calculative historical communication region is recorded and applied for decreasing the repeated searches. The performance of our approach has been assessed in a group of simulation experiments with various environment configurations. The simulation results present the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed approach considering the performance measures such as success rate and travelled path length.