Robot's Energy Consumption Based Multi-Robot Exploration Strategy

This paper addresses the problem of exploring an unknown environment with a team of mobile robots. The objective is to build a coherent representation of the environment in minimum time. This can be achieved by applying an efficient coordination method which assigns to each robot the appropriate target location. In this context, we present a decentralized coordination approach that takes into account the structure of the environment and the energy consumption of each robot favouring a well-balanced spatial distribution of the robots in this one. The exploration target is the segment of environment including the frontiers between the unknown and the explored areas. The robot evaluates its relative rank among the other robots in term of energy consumption to reach this target. Thus, the robot is assigned to the segment for which it has the lowest rank. This approach has been implemented and tested in computerized simulation and a comparison with some existing approaches has been performed. The results demonstrate that our approach distributes efficiently the robots over the environment which allows to reduce the overall exploration time.