Mapping and path planning using communication graph of unlocalized and randomly deployed robotic swarm

Abstract

This paper proposes mapping and path planning algorithms for an unknown environment using a communication graph of an unlocalized robotic swarm system. Unlike the previous efforts that used the absolute position information of all the robots, in the proposed algorithms, the unknown environment is described as the communication connectivity graph achieved via a distributed consensus algorithm. Thus, since robots have no positioning sensors, the proposed mapping and path planning algorithms can simplify the procedures and reduce the costs. The numerical simulations are included to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithms.