Decentralized Strategy for Cooperative Multi-Robot Exploration and Mapping

This work presents a novel approach to autonomous decentralized multi-robot frontier exploration and mapping of an unknown area. A mobile robot team simultaneously explores the environment, discovers frontier points (points on the border between explored and unexplored space), and shares information in order to become dispersed throughout the environment. During the exploration, information exchanged between the mobile robots is limited to data containing mobile robot positions and current mobile robot target points. The main goal of the approach is to allocate the mobile robots to target frontier points in a way which minimizes the overall exploration time. Moreover, a mobile robot team at the same time creates a common map of the environment. The proposed strategy has been implemented in a simulation environment and compared with a state-of-the-art exploration strategy. Simulation results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed decentralized multi-robot strategy. Copyright (C) 2020 The Authors.