MinPos : A novel frontier allocation algorithm for multi-robot exploration

Abstract

Exploring an unknown environment with multiple robots requires an efficient coordination method to minimize the total duration. A standard method to discover new areas is to assign frontiers (boundaries between unexplored and explored accessible areas) to robots. In this context, the frontier allocation method is paramount. This paper introduces a decentralized and computationally efficient frontier allocation method favoring a well balanced spatial distribution of robots in the environment. For this purpose, each robot evaluates its relative rank among the other robots in term of travel distance to each frontier. Accordingly, robots are allocated to the frontier for which it has the lowest rank. To evaluate this criteria, a wavefront propagation is computed from each frontier giving an interesting alternative to path planning from robot to frontiers. Comparisons with existing approaches in computerized simulation and on real robots demonstrated the validity and efficiency of our algorithm. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012.