Multi Robot Area Exploration Using Circle Partitioning Method

Abstract

Exploration of an unknown area is an important topic in multi robot system. Due to its various applications it gains the concern of various researchers. In this paper an approach that is based on circle partitioning method for workload sharing is proposed. Unknown area is partitioned into sub regions equal to the number of available robots, each robot is assigned to different sub region and then the team of mobile robots starts exploration. The aim is to decrease the exploration time. A popular concept for the exploration problem i.e. based on the notion of frontiers has been used. The proposed algorithm has been tested in a set of environments with different level of complexity depending on number of obstacles. This can be used in real world for search and rescue operations where time is a major constraint.