A navigation strategy for cooperative multiple mobile robots

Abstract

The problem of navigation of cooperative multiple heterogeneous mobile robots is investigated. The mobile robots vary in size and their capabilities in terms of speeds to navigate through the region and sensor ranges to acquire information about the region. The robots are assumed to have sufficient memory to store the map and to be able to communicate with each other. An algorithm is presented for plane sweep by cooperative multiple mobile robots. The authors' approach makes use of an occupancy grid and the robots sensors are to sweep all pixels of the grid. The algorithm is discussed in detail and its feasibility is demonstrated by simulation results for the case of two cooperating mobile robots.