Coordinating multi-robot systems through environment partitioning for adaptive informative sampling

Abstract

As robotic platforms have become more capable and autonomous, they have increasingly been utilized in time sensitive applications such as search and rescue. To that end, we have developed a system for teams of robots to efficiently explore an environment while taking sensor measurements. The system utilizes an information seeking algorithm that generates high priority points of interest based on the highest expected information gained per distance travelled. In order to coordinate multiple robots, the system partitions the area into different regions according to the effort needed to explore each region. Robots are assigned different regions to measure in order to minimize repetition of work and reduce interference between each robot.We present an information rate adaptive sampling approach for tasking robots within an environment to gather sensor measurements. We evaluated our approach within a simulation environment with one to four robots. Multiple robots are coordinated through our region segmentation approach. The data shows efficiency gains through the use of adaptive information gain rate tasking above a naïve closest point approach. We also see positive results from using the region segmentation technique. We further the experimentation by testing the algorithm on real world robots and verify the results in real world experimentation.