Virtual Region based Multirobot Path Planning in an Unknown Occluded Environment This paper introduces an arbitraryregion based shapecontrol methodology for a swarmrobotics framework to conquer the traditional obstacleavoidance problem. In this control approach, during the movement of a team of robots through an unknown occluded environment, a virtual boundary for the robotic crowd that could pass through even a very narrow passage, as a swarm, has been created based on the agentsxe2x80x99 robotsxe2x80x99 sensing information. The primary challenge is to force each and every agent to fit into the arbitrary boundary, thus created, so that they can form a swarm and eventually progress towards the goal while avoiding obstacles. Consequently, the process maximizes the interagent cohesion. Furthermore, the virtual region is subdivided into socalled cells designated by a nonoverlapping circular geometry. The utmost endeavor is to make an agent place itself at the center of a circular cell and a mechanism has been devised, where each agent is duly attracted and eventually is resident at the center of each cell completely blanketing the entire virtual region. To place each agent inside the stipulated contour, a novel circlepacking algorithm has been proposed such that the contour is fitted with a number of identical circles. Finally, the simulation results along with hardware implementation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control technique.

Rangelimited, Distributed Algorithms on HigherOrder Voronoi Partitions in MultiRobot Systems This paper studies the problem of distributed computation of higher order Voronoi partition over a bounded region by a group of robots with both rangelimited visibility sensors and communication devices. We model the sensing and communication capabilities by discs with limited radius. Motivated by the concept of dominating region in higherorder Voronoi partition, we propose a detecting ray based algorithm, which computes the boundary points of the dominating region of a robot in an omnidirectional manner, with local position information of its neighbors within the communication range. Simulations are provided to demonstrate the performance of our proposed algorithm by using a thirteenrobot group.