a study of terrain coverage models
The ability to cover a terrain has numerous applications to our everyday lives: from spell checking to Web crawling, from surveillance to automated vacuuming. Indeed, these applications require different approaches to solving the coverage problem because they are based on different ways of evaluating the goodness of the coverage; a good terrain coverage to vacuuming may not be desirable in Web crawling. To better understand the issues, this paper divides the terrain coverage problem into two classes (temporal and spatial) and discusses the performance of standard and self-organized algorithms as means of solving both classes of coverage problem. In order to perform the comparison the paper introduces suitable metrics to evaluate the goodness of a coverage (temporal or spatial).
terrain coverage autonomous agents