Coordinating Multiple Robots During Exploration Under Communication With Limited B

In this paper, we consider the problem of exploring an unknown environment with a team of mobile robots using a communication link with limited bandwidth. The key problem to be solved in this context is to decide which information should be transmitted over the network to enable the robots to choose appropriate target points. In this paper, each robot approximates its map by a set of polygons. We present an efficient way to incrementally improve the representation. We furthermore adapt an existing coordination strategy so that it is able to deal with our approximated maps in a distributed fashion. Our technique has been implemented and tested. The results demonstrate that our distributed technique can efficiently spread the robots in the environment even if the communication link provides only a low bandwidth. As a result, the robots are able to quickly accomplish their exploration mission despite the constraints introduced by the limited bandwidth.

[1]  Brian Yamauchi,et al.  Frontier-based exploration using multiple robots , 1998, AGENTS '98.

[2]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Coordinated multi-robot exploration , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[3]  Bernhard Nebel,et al.  CS Freiburg: coordinating robots for successful soccer playing , 2002, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[4]  David H. Douglas,et al.  ALGORITHMS FOR THE REDUCTION OF THE NUMBER OF POINTS REQUIRED TO REPRESENT A DIGITIZED LINE OR ITS CARICATURE , 1973 .

[5]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Collaborative multi-robot exploration , 2000, Proceedings 2000 ICRA. Millennium Conference. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Symposia Proceedings (Cat. No.00CH37065).

[6]  John Hershberger,et al.  An O(nlogn) implementation of the Douglas-Peucker algorithm for line simplification , 1994, SCG '94.

[7]  Henrik I. Christensen,et al.  Autonomous Pool Cleaning: Self Localization and Autonomous Navigation for Cleaning , 2000, Auton. Robots.

[8]  Maja J. Mataric,et al.  Sold!: auction methods for multirobot coordination , 2002, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[9]  H. Kuhn.  The Hungarian method for the assignment problem , 1955 .

[10]  Lilian Buzer.  A Survey and a New Competitive Method for the Planar min-# Problem , 2002, ArXiv.

[11]  Kurt Konolige,et al.  A practical, decision-theoretic approach to multi-robot mapping and exploration , 2003, Proceedings 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2003) (Cat. No.03CH37453).

[12]  Bernhard Nebel,et al.  Dynamic decentralized area partitioning for cooperating cleaning robots , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[13]  Paul S. Heckbert,et al.  Survey of Polygonal Surface Simplification Algorithms , 1997 .

[14]  Robin R. Murphy,et al.  Human-robot interaction in rescue robotics , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C (Applications and Reviews).

[15]  Tucker R. Balch,et al.  Communication in reactive multiagent robotic systems , 1995, Auton. Robots.

[16]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  A system for volumetric robotic mapping of abandoned mines , 2003, 2003 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.03CH37422).

[17]  Gaurav S. Sukhatme,et al.  An incremental deployment algorithm for mobile robot teams , 2002, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[18]  Daniele Nardi,et al.  Distributed Coordination in Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Systems , 2003, Auton. Robots.

[19]  Ernest L. Hall,et al.  Automatic Operation For A Robot Lawn Mower , 1987, Other Conferences.

[20]  Anthony Stentz,et al.  Multi-robot exploration controlled by a market economy , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[21]  William Whittaker,et al.  Robotic Antarctic meteorite search: outcomes , 2001, Proceedings 2001 ICRA. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.01CH37164).

[22]  Shin-Ting Wu,et al.  A non-self-intersection Douglas-Peucker algorithm , 2003, 16th Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing (SIBGRAPI 2003).