Abstract. Area coverage is a well-known problem in multi robotic systems, and it is a typical requirement in various real-world applications. A common and popular approach in the robotic community is to use explicit forms of communication for task allocation and coordination. These approaches are susceptible to the loss of communication signal, and costly with high computational complexity. There are very few approaches which are focused on implicit forms of communication. In these approaches, robots rely only on their local information for task allocation and coordination. In this paper, a cooperative strategy is proposed by which a team of robots perform spraying a large field. The focus of this paper is to achieve task allocation and coordination using only the robots' local information.

Because of the significant drop in the number of farmers and increase in the earth population, the use of autonomous farming units including unmanned tractors is becoming more and more popular. However, relying on a single autonomous farming unit to carry out the entire task on a large field is inefficient. Using multiple autonomous tractors bring more efficiency, however, without cooperation this attempt will fail (Mataric et al., 1995). This cooperation can be achieved by an appropriate task allocation and coordination mechanism between the participating units. The current trend in this field is to use direct forms of communication in any form of directional or broadcasting meaningful messages among the group. The messages I would like to, firstly, thank my wife who supported me through thick and thin in this journey. I couldn't complete this program without her support and patience. My gratitude goes to my Director of Studies, Prof. Jacques Penders, for his continued invaluable support, advice and guidance and with whom my robotic life began. I am also grateful to Dr Lyuba Alboul, my Doctoral supervisor, who challenged my thinking and made me realise the importance of each small achievement. Both of you have been inspirational and this journey would not have been possible without you. Finally, I would like thank my sister and parents, who also supported me in this journey.