Multi-robot Coordination for Energy-Efficient Exploration

This paper investigates the problem of multi-robot exploration in unknown environment situations. In order to build a coherent representation of the environment, a decentralized coordination approach is proposed to minimize the exploration time while considering the total motion energy saving of the mobile robots. The exploration target is defined as a segment of the environment including the frontiers between the unknown and the explored areas. Each robot evaluates its relative rank among the other robots of the team regarding energy consumption to reach this exploration target. As a result, the robot is assigned to the segment for which it has the lowest rank. An implementation on real robots and tests in simulation as well as a comparison with some existing approaches have been performed. The obtained results demonstrate the validity and the efficiency of the proposed method.