Multi-Robot Exploration Employing Harmonic Map Transformations

Abstract

Robot Exploration can be used to autonomously map an area or conduct search missions in remote or hazardous environments. Using multiple robots to perform this task can improve efficiency for time-critical applications. In this work, a distributed method for multi-robot exploration using a Harmonic Map Transformation (HMT) is presented. We employ SLAM to construct a map of the unknown area and utilize map merging to share terrain information amongst robots. Then, a frontier allocation strategy is proposed to increase efficiency. The HMT is used to safely navigate the robots to the frontiers until the exploration task is complete. We validate the efficacy of the proposed strategy via tests in simulated and real-world environments. Our method is compared to other recent schemes for multi-robot exploration and is shown to outperform them in terms of total path distance.