Sensor-based Exploration of an Unknown Area with Multiple Mobile Agents

Abstract

The research field of effective coverage of a certain area has received considerable attention, especially in exploration tasks. The ability of robots to localize themselves in a map and to plan elaborated motions are the basics of many coverage approaches. Cooperative, multiple robots can be employed in order to accelerate exploration missions. Over the past years, many methods have been investigated for this purpose. However, either the robots know the obstacle locations or they are not capable of identifying their environment completely. In this study, we propose a sensor-based framework to cover a given space simultaneously with multiple mobile agents in a cooperative fashion without any prior knowledge of the environment. With our approach, the agents are capable of avoiding collisions with different shaped obstacles and autonomously constructing a map of the whole area by identifying inaccessible domains in the map.