Towards a communication free coordination for multi-robot exploration

Abstract

Abstract — Frontier-based exploration method are known to be ef cient for multi-robot exploration systems. In this paper, we propose a novel, computationally inexpensive, frontier allocation method favoring a well balanced spatial distribution of robots in the environment. It is based on the computation of a position criteria. The position of a robot towards a frontier is de ned by the number of robots closer to the frontier. Distances to frontiers are computed using a wavefront propagation from each frontier. The local minimum free potential elds, thus created, are also used for navigation achieved by descending the potential eld gradient. Comparisons with existing approaches in simulation demonstrated the ef ciency of our algorithm and experiments on robots validated the navigation method. I.