A novel approach for coordinated multi-robot exploration

Abstract

This paper addresses the multi-robot exploration problem in unknown environments. The proposed method aims to minimize the exploration time considering the robot's limited energy. The target area is defined as a frontier which represents the limit between an unknown and explored part of the environment. Thus, each robot from the team is assigned to the frontier for which it has the lowest rank among the other robots in term of energy consumption. An implementation and tests in computerized simulation as well as a comparison with some existing approaches has been performed. The results obtained demonstrate the validity and the efficiency of our method.