TITLE:
An Autonomous Exploration Strategy for Cooperative Mobile Robots
AUTHORS:
Mohammad Al Khawaldah, Mohammad Al-Khedher, Ibrahim Al-Adwan, Ayman Al Rawashdeh
KEYWORDS:
Autonomous; Intelligent; Frontier; Multi-Robot Exploration; Mapping; A-Star
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications,
Vol.7 No.3,
March
27,
2014
ABSTRACT: Frontier-based exploration
methods are efficient for multi-robot exploration systems. In this paper,
enhanced frontier-based techniques are used with team of cooperating mobile
robots to explore unknown environment. The aim of the exploration algorithm is
to minimize the exploration time by coordinating the robots to maximize overall
utility by minimizing the potential of overlapping in information gained
amongst the robots. The proposed frontier-based exploration algorithm is based
on a new bidding function to decrease the overlap between the robots in
addition to the utility and cost parameters. A special parameter depends on the
future positions of the robots is also considered. The proposed algorithm has
been tested with different environments. We also compared it to A* algorithm.
Comparisons demonstrated the efficiency of proposed algorithm.