Coordinated Multi-Robot Exploration

Abstract

In the previous chapter, we introduced a framework for mobile robot exploration. The goal of our approach was to select appropriate viewpoints for a single robot in order to build a map with low uncertainty. In contrast to that, we consider in this chapter the problem of exploring unknown environments with a team of cooperating robots. The use of multiple robots is often suggested to have advantages over single robot systems [20, 35]. First, cooperating robots have the potential to accomplish a task faster than a single robot [58]. By using several robots, redundancy can be explicitely introduced so that such a team can be expected to be more fault-tolerant than a single robot. Another advantage of robot teams arises from merging overlapping sensor information, which can help to compensate for sensor uncertainty. As a result, the map can be expected to be more accurate. Multiple robots have also been shown to localize themselves more efficiently, especially when they have different sensor capabilities [42, 122].KeywordsMobile RobotTarget LocationTravel Salesman ProblemCommunication RangeReal RobotThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.