Online switch of communication modalities for efficient multirobot exploration

Exploration of unknown environments with multirobot systems subject to communication constraints is a task involved in several applications, like search and rescue and monitoring. The approaches proposed so far to address this problem are usually based on the use of a single communication modality, for instance, either multi-hop (MH) or rendezvous (RV), during the whole mission. However, it has been conjectured that online switching between communication modalities could be beneficial. In this work, we empirically investigate this hypothesis by presenting an exploring multirobot system that can originally switch between communication modalities during an exploration mission.