Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ward, James C., Richards, Arthur, Hunt, Edmund R.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13069
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915497397714944
author Ward, James C.
Richards, Arthur
Hunt, Edmund R.
author_facet Ward, James C.
Richards, Arthur
Hunt, Edmund R.
contents Persistent monitoring using robot teams is of interest in fields such as security, environmental monitoring, and disaster recovery. Performing such monitoring in a fully on-line decentralised fashion has significant potential advantages for robustness, adaptability, and scalability of monitoring solutions, including, in principle, the capacity to effectively adapt in real-time to a changing environment. We examine this through the lens of multi-robot patrol, in which teams of patrol robots must persistently minimise time between visits to points of interest, within environments where traversability of routes is highly dynamic. These dynamics must be observed by patrol agents and accounted for in a fully decentralised on-line manner. In this work, we present a new method of monitoring and adjusting for environment dynamics in a decentralised multi-robot patrol team. We demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms realistic baselines in highly dynamic scenarios, and also investigate dynamic scenarios in which explicitly accounting for environment dynamics may be unnecessary or impractical.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_13069
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Practical Handling of Dynamic Environments in Decentralised Multi-Robot Patrol
Ward, James C.
Richards, Arthur
Hunt, Edmund R.
Robotics
Persistent monitoring using robot teams is of interest in fields such as security, environmental monitoring, and disaster recovery. Performing such monitoring in a fully on-line decentralised fashion has significant potential advantages for robustness, adaptability, and scalability of monitoring solutions, including, in principle, the capacity to effectively adapt in real-time to a changing environment. We examine this through the lens of multi-robot patrol, in which teams of patrol robots must persistently minimise time between visits to points of interest, within environments where traversability of routes is highly dynamic. These dynamics must be observed by patrol agents and accounted for in a fully decentralised on-line manner. In this work, we present a new method of monitoring and adjusting for environment dynamics in a decentralised multi-robot patrol team. We demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms realistic baselines in highly dynamic scenarios, and also investigate dynamic scenarios in which explicitly accounting for environment dynamics may be unnecessary or impractical.
title Practical Handling of Dynamic Environments in Decentralised Multi-Robot Patrol
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13069