Map acquisition in multi-robot systems based on time shared scheduling

Distance information for robot's surrounding environment is very useful to acquire environmental maps and plan robot's paths. However it is difficult for active sensors, such as ultrasonic sensors, to measure distances accurately in ail environment in which multiple robots exist because emissions from the Sensors interfere each other. Ail exclusive operation of emission for the sensors is one of solutions to avoid interference of the emission, when a robot measures distances for its surrounding objects in such environment. We have already proposed the time shared scheduling to make synchronization between sensors for achieving the. exclusive operation using local communication. In this paper, we introduce the occupancy grid method and propose map acquisition method in multi-robot systems based on the time shared scheduling. After a concept of the time shared scheduling to make synchronization, the environmental map acquisition method based oil the scheduling is described. A computational simulation is conducted to show efficiency of proposed method.