Multi-robot Autonomous Exploration and Map Merging in Unknown Environments

摘要

This work aims to develop and implement Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) on multiple mobile robots, to accomplish that, each robot must autonomously explore and merge their individual estimated maps of an environment into one full global map. Robots must obey rules of coordination to not fall into “blind” multi-robot SLAM, where each robot is unaware of each other and can’t take in consideration the advantage of multi-robot systems. In order to validate the proposed approach, experiments using simulated robots were applied to autonomously explore and map indoor environments with the objective of complete a percentage of the total available area, in a task called coverage.