Flocking-Based Multi-Robot Exploration

Abstract

Exploration of an unknown environment is one of the major applications of Multi-Robot Systems. Many works have proposed multi-robot coordination algorithms to accomplish exploration missions based on multi-agent systems techniques. Some of these works particularly focus on multi-robot exploration under communication constraint. In this paper, we propose a solution based on flocking rules in order to explore an open area while keeping robots close enough to avoid disconnections. We show that the multi-robot coordination resulting from this approach is effective and exhibits interesting properties compared to other works in the literature.