Abstract-This paper addresses the problem of exploring an unknown environment with a team of mobile robots. The key issue in coordinated multi-robot exploration is how to assign target locations to the individual robots such that the overall mission time is minimized. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to distribute the robots over the environment that takes into account the structure of the environment. To achieve this, it partitions the space into segments, for example, corresponding to individual rooms. Instead of only considering frontiers between unknown and explored areas as target locations, we send the robots to the individual segments with the task to explore the corresponding area. Our approach has been implemented and tested in simulation as well as in real world experiments. The experiments demonstrate that the overall exploration time can be significantly reduced by considering our segmentation method.
REF presented a strategy for coordinating a team of exploring robots by using Voronoi diagram for the segmentation of the environment map.
Coordinated multi-robot exploration using a segmentation of the environment
2008 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
2008 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
Computer Science