Multi-robot Decentralized Exploration using a Trade-based Approach

This paper addresses the problem of exploring an unknown environment by a coordinated team of robots. An important question is, which robot should explore which region? In this paper, we present a novel decentralized task allocation approach based on trading rules for multi-robot exploration. In the decentralized system, robots can make their own decisions according to the local information with limited communication. In contrast to previous approaches, our trade-based approach is designed to simulate the relationship between buyers and sellers in a business system, to achieve dynamic task allocation by using a mechanism of unsolicited bid. Our approach has been implemented and evaluated in simulation. The experimental results demonstrate a good performance of the proposed trade-based approach compared to previous approaches.

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