DistributedMulti-robot.PDFVIP

1 Distributed Multi-robot Exploration and Mapping Dieter Fox Jonathan Ko Kurt Konolige? Benson Limketkai Dirk Schulz? Benjamin Stewart University of Washington, Department of Computer Science Engineering, Seattle, WA 98195 ?Arti?cial Intelligence Center, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA 94025 ?University of Bonn, Department of Computer Science III, Bonn, Germany Abstract— Ef?cient exploration of unknown environments is were collected by a single robot. Consistent integration of the a fundamental problem in mobile robotics. In this paper we data when the robots do not know their relative locations is present an approach to distributed multi-robot mapping and more dif?cult, since it is not clear how and where the robots’ exploration. Our system enables teams of robots to ef?ciently explore environments from different, unknown locations. In order traces should be connected. to ensure consistency when combining their data into shared Limited communication: During exploration of large-scale maps, the robots actively seek to verify their relative locations. environments, communication between the robots and a con- Using shared maps, they coordinate their exploration strategies trol station might fail. To achieve robustness against such so as to maximize the ef?ciency of exploration. Our system was failures, each robot has to be able to explore on its own, evaluated under extremely realistic real-world conditions. An outside evaluation team found the system to be highly ef?cient i.e., without guidance by a central control node. Furthermore, and robust. The maps generated by our approach are consistently groups of robots should be able to coordinate their actions more accurate than those generated by manually measuring the without the need of a centra