Multi-Robot Exploration

A problem of exploring an unknown environment by a team of mobile robots is solved by combination of multi-agent architecture A-globe with frontier based exploration technique. The A-globe architecture allows solving the exploration problem with limited communication accessibility and with changing number of participating robots. A novel method combining A* search with harmonic potential fields is used in frontier based path planning. An improved version of the Iterative Closest Point localization algorithm has been developed to increase its speed and robustness. The whole exploration framework has been implemented and tested in both simulated and real environments.