New Cost Function for Multi-Robot Exploration

Abstract

This paper discusses the problem of multi-robot exploration. The objective of this problem is to explore an unknown environment using a team of mobile robots in a minimum amount of time. We believe that in an unknown environment, it is very difficult to estimate the amount of new information expected from a frontier location. We propose a new objective for the assignment algorithm and introduce a new cost function to be used in the assignment algorithm that leads to better motion planning. For the sake of simplicity, we suggest to use greedy algorithm for the assignment algorithm. In this paper, we also proposed a method for exploration problem with robots' limited communication capability, by estimating the missing robots' position, so that the outcome will not degrade significantly