New exploration strategy for cooperative mobile robots
Mohammad Al Khawaldah, Ibrahim Al-Adwan, Khaled Abd El-Azim Eid · International Conference on Electronics, Hardware, Wireless and Optical Communications · 2012
In this paper, a frontier-based technique is used with team of cooperating mobile robots to explore unknown environment. The aim is to decrease the exploration time. The exploration algorithm explicitly coordinates the robots. It tries to maximize overall utility by minimizing the potential of overlap in information gain amongst the robots. The proposed frontier-based exploration algorithm is based on a new bidding function in which a special parameter was introduced to decrease the overlap between the robots in addition to the utility and cost parameters. The special parameter depends on the future positions of the robots. The proposed algorithm has been tested with different environments. The new technique led to promising results.