Distributed Constraint Reasoning Applied to Multi-robot Exploration

Abstract

Exploration of an unknown environment is one of the major applications of multi-robot systems. Many works have proposed multi-robot coordination algorithms to accomplish exploration missions based on multi-agent techniques. Some of these works focus on multi-robot exploration under communication constraints. In this paper, we propose an original way to formalize and solve this issue. Our proposal relies on distributed constraint satisfaction problems (disCSP) which are an extension of classical constraint satisfaction problems (CSP). Compared to other works, our proposal is fully distributed and guaranties the exploration of an unknown environment with maintenance of connectivity between all the members of a robots' team.