A Randomized Strategy for Cooperative Robot Exploration

Abstract

We present a cooperative exploration strategy for mobile robots. The method is based on the randomized incremental generation of a collection of data structures called sensor-based random trees, each representing a roadmap of an explored area with an associated safe region. Decentralized cooperation and coordination mechanisms are introduced so as to improve the exploration efficiency and to avoid conflicts. Simulations in various environments are presented to show the performance of the proposed technique.