Generation of unknown environment maps by cooperative low-cost robots

Abstract

In this paper we present some results obtained with a troupe of low-cost robots designed to cooperatively explore unknown structured orthogonal environments. In order to improve the covering of the explored zone the robots show different behaviours (routine, normal and anxious) and cooperate by transferring each other the perceived environment when they meet; therefore, not all the information of the non-returning robots is lost provided that they had encountered robots that safely returned. The returning robots deliver to a host their perceived and communicated (by other robots) partial maps and the host incrementally generates the most plausible map of the environment. To perform the map generation, a fusion, completion and alignment process of the partial maps, based on fuzzy techniques, has been developed.