Multirobot Exploration of Communication-Restricted Environments: A Survey

Exploration of initially unknown environments is an online task in which autonomous mobile robots coordinate themselves to efficiently discover free spaces and obstacles. Several efforts have been devoted to study coordinated multirobot exploration assuming that communication is possible between any two locations. The problem of developing multirobot systems for effective exploration in the presence of communication constraints, despite its remarkable practical relevance, is comparably much less studied. The authors provide a taxonomy of the field of communication-restricted multirobot exploration, survey recent work in this field, and outline some promising research directions.

[1]  Vijay Kumar,et al.  Online methods for radio signal mapping with mobile robots , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[2]  Stephen Cameron,et al.  Time Preference for Information in Multi-agent Exploration with Limited Communication , 2013, TAROS.

[3]  K. Madhava Krishna,et al.  A two phase recursive tree propagation based multi-robotic exploration framework with fixed base station constraint , 2010, 2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[4]  Arnoud Visser,et al.  Including communication success in the estimation of information gain for multi-robot exploration , 2008, 2008 6th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks and Workshops.

[5]  Arturo Gil,et al.  A comparison of path planning strategies for autonomous exploration and mapping of unknown environments , 2012, Auton. Robots.

[6]  Andreas Birk,et al.  Distributed Communicative Exploration under underwater communication constraints , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics.

[7]  Matt W. Mutka,et al.  Steiner traveler: Relay deployment for remote sensing in heterogeneous multi-robot exploration , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[8]  Paramvir Bahl,et al.  RADAR: an in-building RF-based user location and tracking system , 2000, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2000. Conference on Computer Communications. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Cat. No.00CH37064).

[9]  Jan Faigl,et al.  On benchmarking of frontier-based multi-robot exploration strategies , 2015, 2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR).

[10]  Kurt Konolige,et al.  Distributed Multirobot Exploration and Mapping , 2005, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[11]  Geoffrey A. Hollinger,et al.  Multi-UAV exploration with limited communication and battery , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[12]  Damian M. Lyons,et al.  Leveraging area bounds information for autonomous decentralized multi-robot exploration , 2015, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[13]  Andreas Birk,et al.  Merging Occupancy Grid Maps From Multiple Robots , 2006, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[14]  Geoffrey A. Hollinger,et al.  Multirobot Coordination With Periodic Connectivity: Theory and Experiments , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

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

[16]  Boleslaw K. Szymanski,et al.  Efficient and inefficient ant coverage methods , 2001, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence.

[17]  Ning Xi,et al.  Connectivity and bandwidth-aware real-time exploration in mobile robot networks , 2013, Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput..

[18]  François Charpillet,et al.  Multi-robot taboo-list exploration of unknown structured environments , 2015, 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

[19]  Jindong Tan,et al.  Distributed multi-robot coordination in area exploration , 2006, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[20]  Stephen Cameron,et al.  Rendezvous through obstacles in multi-agent exploration , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (2014).

[21]  Daniele Nardi,et al.  Multirobot systems: a classification focused on coordination , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B (Cybernetics).

[22]  Ning Xu,et al.  Improved analysis of a multirobot graph exploration strategy , 2014, 2014 13th International Conference on Control Automation Robotics & Vision (ICARCV).

[23]  K. Madhava Krishna,et al.  Multi-robot exploration with communication requirement to a moving base station , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE).

[24]  Nicola Basilico,et al.  Minimizing communication latency in multirobot situation-aware patrolling , 2015, 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

[25]  Nicola Basilico,et al.  Asynchronous multirobot exploration under recurrent connectivity constraints , 2016, 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[26]  Nicola Basilico,et al.  Multirobot online construction of communication maps , 2017, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[27]  Vijay Kumar,et al.  Visibility-based deployment of robot formations for communication maintenance , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[28]  Oussama Khatib,et al.  Real-Time Obstacle Avoidance for Manipulators and Mobile Robots , 1985, Autonomous Robot Vehicles.

[29]  Tüze Kuyucu,et al.  Superadditive effect of multi-robot coordination in the exploration of unknown environments via stigmergy , 2015, Neurocomputing.

[30]  Laurent Jeanpierre,et al.  Coordinated Multi-Robot Exploration Under Communication Constraints Using Decentralized Markov Decision Processes , 2012, AAAI.

[31]  Andreas Birk,et al.  Multi-robot exploration under the constraints of wireless networking , 2007 .

[32]  Christian Bettstetter,et al.  Collaboration in Multi-Robot Exploration: To Meet or not to Meet? , 2016, J. Intell. Robotic Syst..

[33]  Ronald C. Arkin,et al.  Line-of-sight constrained exploration for reactive multiagent robotic teams , 2002, 7th International Workshop on Advanced Motion Control. Proceedings (Cat. No.02TH8623).

[34]  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).

[35]  Elias B. Kosmatopoulos,et al.  Real-time adaptive multi-robot exploration with application to underwater map construction , 2016, Auton. Robots.

[36]  Christian Bettstetter,et al.  Coordinated multi-robot exploration: Out of the box packages for ROS , 2014, 2014 IEEE Globecom Workshops (GC Wkshps).

[37]  G. Oriolo,et al.  The Sensor-based Random Graph Method for Cooperative Robot Exploration , 2009, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics.

[38]  Maria L. Gini,et al.  Communication-Restricted Exploration for Search Teams , 2014, DARS.

[39]  Sebastian Thrun,et al.  Robotic mapping: a survey , 2003 .

[40]  Torsten Andre Autonomous exploration by robot teams: coordination, communication, and collaboration / Dipl.-Ing. Torsten Andre , 2015 .