Efficient strategy for co-ordinated multirobot exploration

  • Authors:

  • Sonali Patel;Anupam Shukla;Ritu Tiwari

  • Affiliations:

  • Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, India;Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, India;Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, India

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Computational Science, Engineering and Information Technology
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Area exploration is the key behind many researches in robotics. Numerous exploration problems have been solved based on the concept of frontiers that can be defined as the boundary between the explored and unexplored cell. In this paper we considered the problem of energy efficient exploration with a team of robots. An approach has been proposed that chooses the next frontier based on the direction strategy which simultaneously takes into account the location of other robot as well. Whenever a frontier has to be assigned to a specific robot, the utility of the unexplored area visible from this position is increased so that at a time not more than single robot moves to the same cell. Based on the direction penalty is calculated for each target points. Then the frontier having minimum utility and penalty has been chosen as the next target point. The robot moves to that frontier cell using energy efficient A* algorithm. The energy efficient A* gives optimal results taking into account energy consumed for stops and turns. Java based platform is used to run the simulation. Proposed algorithm has been tested on various test maps. The result shows that our technique accomplishes the mission quickly as compared to single robot energy efficient exploration and effectively distributes the robots over the environment.