SyWaP: Synchronized wavefront propagation for multi-robot assignment of spatially-situated tasks

Abstract

Abstract-Task assignment is paramount for the efficiency of multi-robot missions. In the context of multi-robot exploration of unknown environments, tasks can be identified as targets to reach in order to expand knowledge of the environment. These targets can be frontiers between known reachable area and unknown areas or a best view configuration to observe each frontiers. Once these tasks are identified, they are assigned to robots. Standard approaches work in a two step process where the costs of reaching targets are computed before running a task allocation algorithm. In this article, we combine these two steps to propose an efficient task allocation algorithm. This algorithm can take into account different assignment criteria such as the rank of a robot in a list of robots ordered by cost.

An Auto-Adaptive Multi-Objective Strategy for Multi-Robot Exploration of Constrained-Communication Environments

“…All segments (wp k , wp k+1 ) are safe given that they are always built regarding only the collision-free pathways present in the known region E known . The wavefront propagation method proposed by [43] is employed to determine the waypoint sequence. The shape and behaviour of the Ψ function are depicted in Figure 5.…”

“…The Mapping component implements a standard occupancy grid approach [46] where the posterior of the map is calculated from a collection of separate problems of estimating p(m k |z(t), X i (t)) for all grid cell m i and where each m i has attached to it one of the occupancy values S = { f , o, u} (previously defined in Section 2.1). The Path Planning component implements the wave-front propagation approach introduced in [43].…”

Multi-robot taboo-list exploration of unknown structured environments

“…Frontier-based algorithms guide the exploration by pushing the agents towards the boundaries between the open explored space and the space yet unexplored [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. The exploration ends when all the space was discovered, implying that there are no more frontiers to move to (see Fig.…”