  In many applications, robots autonomous deployment is preferable and
sometimes it is the only affordable solution. To address this issue, virtual
force (VF) is one of the prominent approaches to performing multirobot
deployment autonomously. However, most of the existing VF-based approaches
consider only a uniform deployment to maximize the covered area while ignoring
the criticality of specific locations during the deployment process. To
overcome these limitations, we present a framework for autonomously deploy
robots or vehicles using virtual force. The framework is composed of two
stages. In the first stage, a two-hop Cooperative Virtual Force based Robots
Deployment (Two-hop COVER) is employed where a cooperative relation between
robots and neighboring landmarks is established to satisfy mission
requirements. The second stage complements the first stage and ensures perfect
demand satisfaction by utilizing the Trace Fingerprint technique which
collected traces while each robot traversing the deployment area. Finally, a
fairness-aware version of Two-hop COVER is presented to consider scenarios
where the mission requirements are greater than the available resources (i.e.
robots). We evaluate our framework via extensive simulations. The results
demonstrate outstanding performance compared to contemporary approaches in
terms of total travelled distance, total exchanged messages, total deployment
time, and Jain fairness index.
