Potential-field based multi-robot exploration strategy
Antoine Bautin · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2013
This thesis is part of Cart-O-Matic project set up to participate in the challenge CARROTE (mapping of a territory) organized by the ANR and the DGA. The purpose of this challenge is to build 2D and 3D maps of a static unknown 'apartment-like' environment. In this context, the use of several robots is advantageous because it increases the time efficiency to discover fully the environment. However, as we show, the gain is determined by the level of cooperation between robots. We propose a cooperation strategy for efficient multirobot mapping. A difficulty is the construction of a common map, necessary so that each robot can know the areas of the environment which remain unexplored. For a good cooperation with a simple algorithm we propose a deployment technique based on the choice of a target by each robot. The proposed algorithm tries to distribute the robots in different directions. It is based on calculation of the partial potential fields allowing each robot to compute efficiently its next target. In addition to these theoretical contributions, we describe the complete robotic system implemented in the Cart-O-Matic team that helped win the last edition of the CARROTE challenge.