Recent Trends in Robotic Patrolling

Purpose of Review Robotic patrolling aims at protecting a physical environment by deploying a team of one or more autonomous mobile robots in it. A key problem in this scenario is characterizing and computing effective patrolling strategies that could guarantee some level of protection against different types of threats. This paper provides a survey of contributions that represent the recent research trends to deal with such a challenge. Recent Findings Starting from a set of basic and recurring modeling landmarks, the formulations of robotic patrolling studied by current research are diverse and, to some extent, complementary. Some works propose optimal approaches where the objective function is based on the idleness induced by the patrolling strategy on locations of the environment. On-line methods focus on handling events that can dynamically alter the patrolling task. Adversarial methods, where an underlying game-theoretical interaction with an attacker is modeled, consider sophisticated attacker behaviors. Summary The wide spectrum of heterogenous approaches and techniques shows a common trend of moving towards more realistic models where constraints, dynamic environments, limited attacker capabilities, and richer strategy representations are introduced. The results provide complementarities and synergies towards more effective robotic patrolling systems, paving the way to a set of interesting open problems.