Coordination Strategies for Multi-robot Exploration and Mapping

Abstract

Situational awareness in rescue operations can be provided by teams of autonomous mobile robots. Human operators are required to teleoperate the current generation of mobile robots for this application; however, teleoperation is increas-ingly difficult as the number of robots is expanded. As the number of robots is increased, each robot may interfere with one another and eventually decrease map-ping performance. Through careful consideration of robot team coordination and exploration strategy, large numbers of mobile robots be allocated to accomplish the mapping task more quickly and accurately. 1 Motivation Projects like the Army Research Laboratory's Micro-Autonomous Systems Tech-nology (MAST) [1] seek to introduce the application of large numbers of inex-pensive and simple mobile robots for situational awareness in urban military and rescue operations. Human operators are required to teleoperate the current gener-ation of mobile robots for this application; however, teleoperation is increasingly difficult as the number of robots is expanded. There is evidence in human factors research which indicates that the cognitive load on a human operator is significantly increased when they are asked to teleoperate more than one robot [18]. Autonomy will make it possible to manage larger numbers of small robots for mapping. There is a continuum of options as to the degree of shared autonomy between robot and human operator [11]. Current robots employed in explosive ordi-nance disposal (EOD) missions are fully tele-operated. At the other extreme, robots can be given high-level tasks by the operator, while autonomously handling low-level tasks [3] such as obstacle avoidance or balance maintenance. In this paper, our