Competitive Algorithms and System for Multi-Robot Exploration of Unknown Environments

Abstract

We present an algorithm to explore an orthogonal polygon using a team of p robots. This algorithm combines ideas from information-theoretic exploration algorithms and computational geometry based exploration algorithms. The algorithm is based on a single-robot polygon exploration algorithm and a tree exploration algorithm. We show that the exploration time of our algorithm is competitive (as a function of p) with respect to the offline optimal exploration algorithm. We discuss how this strategy can be adapted to real-world settings to deal with noisy sensors. In addition to theoretical analysis, we investigate the performance of our algorithm through simulations for multiple robots and experiments with a single robot.