A two-level approach for multi-robot coordinated exploration of unstructured environments

• Main Authors: Senarathne, P. G. C. N., Wang, Danwei
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/99121; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/12582
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The efficiency of Multi-Robot Exploration can be improved by having a balanced distribution of robots in the environment. Exploration strategies for indoor/structured environments can ensure a balanced distribution of robots by explicitly assigning robots to distinct regions in the environment. However, unstructured environments do not support partitioning of environments to distinct regions, thus requires an alternative way of ensuring the balanced distribution of the robots. This paper presents a two level approach to multi-robot coordinated exploration of unstructured environments where a classical coordination method is employed at the lower level to provide a localized coordination while a higher level robot repositioning strategy is used to generate a balanced distribution of the robots in the environment. Simulation results indicate that this new approach provides a balanced distribution of the robots over the environment and improves the exploration efficiency over localized coordination strategies.