Improved Resilient Coverage Maximization with Multiple Robots

The task of maximizing coverage using multiple robots has several applications such as surveillance, exploration, and environmental monitoring. A major challenge of deploying such multi-robot systems in a practical scenario is to ensure resilience against robot failures. A recent work [1] introduced the Resilient Coverage Maximization (RCM) problem where the goal is to maximize a submodular coverage utility when the robots are subject to adversarial attacks and/or failures. The RCM problem is known to be NP-hard. The state-of-the-art solution of the RCM problem [1] employs a greedy approximation strategy with theoretical performance guarantees. In this paper, we propose two approximation algorithms for the RCM problem, both of which empirically outperform the existing solution in terms of accuracy and/or execution time. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solution, we empirically compare our proposed algorithms with the existing solution and brute force optimum algorithm.