Coordinated Multi-Robot Exploration

Abstract

Abstract-In this paper, we consider the problem of exploring an unknown environment with a team of robots. As in singlerobot exploration the goal is to minimize the overall exploration time. The key problem to be solved in the context of multiple robots is to choose appropriate target points for the individual robots so that they simultaneously explore different regions of the environment. We present an approach for the coordination of multiple robots, which simultaneously takes into account the cost of reaching a target point and its utility. Whenever a target point is assigned to a specific robot, the utility of the unexplored area visible from this target position is reduced. In this way, different target locations are assigned to the individual robots. We furthermore describe how our algorithm can be extended to situations in which the communication range of the robots is limited. Our technique has been implemented and tested extensively in real-world experiments and simulation runs. The results demonstrate that our technique effectively distributes the robots over the environment and allows them to quickly accomplish their mission.

Evolving a path planner for a multi-robot exploration system using grammatical evolution

“…One common application is autonomous exploration and mapping of unknown areas. In exploration applications, the use of teams of robots has natural advantages, including faster and more thorough exploration and redundancy in case of failure [4]. However, teams of robots require coordinated control of robots movement, making the design of control software more challenging.…”

“…Uncoordinated control of robot movement can result slow or unfinished exploration. The development of coordinated control for multi-robot exploration is an open problem [4].…”

“…Second, path planning, controls navigation of robots to their allocated goal locations. In this work, we perform task allocation using a variant of the Yamauchi's frontier-based algorithm [4], [6]. The focus of this work then is in solving the second problem above, namely, the development of control for path planning.…”

“…RELATED WORK The problem of autonomous robotic exploration has been intensively studied since the late 1990's. For task allocation, one widely known technique is frontier-based exploration 978-1-4577-0674-5/11/$26.00 © 2011 IEEE ISSNIP 2011 [3], [4], [6]. [6] develops a cooperative and decentralised mechanism for map-building by defining frontier cells as goal locations.…”

“…[6] develops a cooperative and decentralised mechanism for map-building by defining frontier cells as goal locations. [4] extends the coordination feature by introducing cost and utility terms in frontier-based algorithm to facilitate maximum information gain. In contrast to the frontier-based exploration, goal locations can also be identified by using Voronoi Graph [8].…”