Abstract. In the world of living creatures, "simple minded" animals often cooperate to achieve common goals with amazing performance. One can consider this idea in the context of robotics, and suggest models for programming goaloriented behavior into the members of a group of simple robots lacking global supervision. This can be done by controlling the local interactions between the robot agents, to have them jointly carry out a given mission. As a test case we analyze the problem of many simple robots cooperating to clean the dirty floor of a non-convex region in Z 2 , using the dirt on the floor as the main means of inter-robot communication.

SUMMARYThis work examines theCooperative Huntersproblem, where a swarm of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) is used for searching one or more “evading targets,” which are moving in a predefined area while trying to avoid a detection by the swarm. By arranging themselves into efficient geometric flight configurations, the UAVs optimize their integrated sensing capabilities, enabling the search of a maximal territory.

Several recent works considered multi agents robotics in static environments (e.g.[2], [4], [5] and others). In this work we examine ways of operating in dynamic environments, in which changes may take place regardless of the agents' activity. The work focuses on a dynamic variant of the known Cooperative Cleaners problem (described and analyzed in [2]). This problem assumes a grid, part of which is "dirty", when the "dirty" part is a connected region of the grid. On this dirty region several agents move, each having the ability to "clean" the place it is located in. The dynamic variant of the problem involves a deterministic evolution of the environment, simulating a spreading contamination, or fire. A cleaning protocol for the problem is presented, as well as several analytic bounds for it. In addition, the work contains simulative results for the proposed protocol.

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