Multi robotic exploration with communication requirement to a fixed base station

Abstract

We present an algorithm for multi robotic exploration of an unknown terrain where the robots are also required to serve the role of hops or nodes in a communication link maintained between a fixed base station and the last robot (end effector robot) in the chain. A baseline algorithm is presented as a tree traversal mechanism akin to a depth first strategy, further embellished by an adaptive rule that decides the number of children based on the local obstacle configuration at a node and avoidance of redundancy in traversal through a look-ahead method that decides the utility of spreading the tree from the current robotic hop node. This system finds immense utility in arenas such as planetary exploration, search and rescue scenarios and scenarios where the robots have limited on-board computing capabilities and need to continuously preserve the link with a fixed base station for receiving instructions or transfer of data.