Autonomous Roving Object's Coverage of its Universe

Abstract

We study the movement of an autonomous roving object (ARO) having no knowledge of its territory, very limited memory, and limited intelligence. The ARO lives at discrete time steps in a two-dimensional universe consisting of discrete cells. The mission of the ARO is to cover its entire universe, without leaving any cell un-visited. We study the degree of success, that is, the percentage of territory that is guaranteed to be visited within a certain number of time steps, with "hundred percent" being full success. We consider different AROs, each characterized by different intelligence, each implemented using a specific finite state machine. We provide a very short review of and comparison with some existing AROs in the literature. Our simulation shows that introducing pseudo-randomness improves the performance ofthe ARO.