Exploring Unknown Environments with Multiple Robots

Abstract

There are numerous studies to find efficient ways for exploring and generating maps for unknown environments. Unfortunately, most of the studies deal with single robots. In this paper, we propose a cooperative exploration strategy for mobile robots. The extension of the SRT method to the case of multiple robots is essentially a parallelization of the basic method. To this simple extension, the following functionalities were added to it: cooperation to increase the efficiency, coordination to avoid conflicts and communication to cooperate and to coordinate. We present simulation results to show the performance of this proposed technique.