An Autonomous Exploration Strategy for Cooperative Mobile Robots

Abstract

Frontier-based exploration methods are efficient for multi-robot exploration systems. In this pa- per, enhanced frontier-based techniques are used with team of cooperating mobile robots to ex- plore unknown environment. The aim of the exploration algorithm is to minimize the exploration time by coordinating the robots to maximize overall utility by minimizing the potential of over- lapping in information gained amongst the robots. The proposed frontier-based exploration algo- rithm is based on a new bidding function to decrease the overlap between the robots in addition to the utility and cost parameters. A special parameter depends on the future positions of the robots is also considered. The proposed algorithm has been tested with different environments. We also compared it to A* algorithm. Comparisons demonstrated the efficiency of proposed algorithm.