Distributed Multirobot Exploration Based on Scene Partitioning and Frontier Selection

Jose J. Lopez-Perez, Uriel H. Hernandez-Belmonte, Juan-Pablo Ramirez-Paredes, Marco A. Contreras-Cruz and Victor Ayala-Ramirez

Mathematical Problems in Engineering, 2018, vol. 2018, 1-17

Abstract:

In mobile robotics, the exploration task consists of navigating through an unknown environment and building a representation of it. The mobile robot community has developed many approaches to solve this problem. These methods are mainly based on two key ideas. The first one is the selection of promising regions to explore and the second is the minimization of a cost function involving the distance traveled by the robots, the time it takes for them to finish the exploration, and others. An option to solve the exploration problem is the use of multiple robots to reduce the time needed for the task and to add fault tolerance to the system. We propose a new method to explore unknown areas, by using a scene partitioning scheme and assigning weights to the frontiers between explored and unknown areas. Energy consumption is always a concern during the exploration, for this reason our method is a distributed algorithm, which helps to reduce the number of communications between robots. By using this approach, we also effectively reduce the time needed to explore unknown regions and the distance traveled by each robot. We performed comparisons of our approach with state-of-the-art methods, obtaining a visible advantage over other works.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/MPE/2018/2373642.pdf (application/pdf)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/MPE/2018/2373642.xml (text/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hin:jnlmpe:2373642

DOI: 10.1155/2018/2373642

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Mathematical Problems in Engineering from Hindawi
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mohamed Abdelhakeem ().