W. Burgard, M. Moors, D. Fox, R. Simmons, and S. Thrun
Collaborative Multi-Robot
Exploration
Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics &
Automation (ICRA), 2000.
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 therefore is to choose appropriate target points for
the individual robots so that they simultaneously explore different
regions of their environment. We present a probabilistic approach
for the coordination of multiple robots which, in contrast to
previous approaches, simultaneously takes into account the costs of
reaching a target point and the utility of target points. The
utility of target points is given by the size of the unexplored area
that a robot can cover with its sensors upon reaching a target
position. 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
@INPROCEEDINGS{Bur00Col,
AUTHOR
= {Burgard, W. and Moors, M. and Fox, D. and Simmons, R. and Thrun, S.},
TITLE
= {Collaborative Multi-Robot Exploration},
YEAR
= {2000},
BOOKTITLE = {Proc.~of IEEE International Conference on Robotics &
Automation (ICRA)}
}