Abstract
This paper addresses the problem of decentralized exploration and mapping of unknown environment by a multiple robot team. The exploration methodology relies on individual decision rules and communication of topological maps to achieve efficient and fast mapping, minimizing overlap of explored space. This distributed solution allows scalability of the proposed methods.
Each robot broadcasts a graph representing the topological map, with information of exploration status of each region. Therefore, this kind of information can be transmitted to robots that are not in the communication range, through other robots in a multi-hop network.
This work has been tested in simulation, and the results demonstrate the performance improvements and robustness that arise from our multi-robot approach to exploration.
This work is financed by the ERDF – European Regional Development Fund through the COMPETE Programme (operational programme for competitiveness), by National Funds through the FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within project FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-022701, and under Carnegie Mellon-Portugal Program grant SFRH/BD/52158/2013.
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Pereira, T., Moreira, A.P., Veloso, M. (2015). Coordination for Multi-robot Exploration Using Topological Maps. In: Moreira, A., Matos, A., Veiga, G. (eds) CONTROLO’2014 – Proceedings of the 11th Portuguese Conference on Automatic Control. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 321. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10380-8_49
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10380-8_49
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