W. Burgard, M. Moors, F. Schneider
Collaborative Exploration of Unknown Environments with Teams of
Mobile Robots.
In Beetz, M. and Hertzberg, J. and Ghallab, M. and Pollack, M.E. (eds.):Advances in Plan-Based Control of Robotic Agents,
Springer Verlag, LNCS, 2002.
Abstract
In this paper we consider the problem of exploring an unknown
environment by a team of robots. As in single-robot exploration the
goal is to minimize the overall exploration time. The key problem to
be solved in the context of multiple robots is to choose appropriate
target points for the individual robots so that they simultaneously
explore different regions of the environment. We present an approach
for the coordination of multiple robots which, in contrast to previous
approaches, simultaneously takes into account the cost of reaching a
target point and its utility. The utility of a target point is given
by the size of the unexplored area that a robot can cover with its
sensors upon reaching that location. Whenever a target point is
assigned to a specific robot, the utility of the unexplored area
visible from this target position is reduced for the other robots.
This way, a team of multiple robots assigns different target points to
the individual robots. The technique has been implemented and tested
extensively in real-world experiments and simulation runs. The
results given in this paper demonstrate that our coordination
technique significantly reduces the exploration time compared to
previous approaches.
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Bibtex
@InCollection{burgard02Dagstuhl,
author = {Burgard, W. and Moors, M. and Schneider, F.},
title = {Collaborative Exploration of Unknown Environments with Teams of
Mobile Robots},
booktitle = {Plan-Based Control of Robotic Agents},
editor = {Beetz, M. and Hertzberg, J. and Ghallab, M. and Pollack, M.E.},
publisher = {Springer Verlag},
series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
year = {2002}
volume = {2466}
}