Distributed Multi-robot Exploration and Mapping

Efficient exploration of unknown environments is a fundamental problem in multi-robot coordination. As autonomous exploration and map building becomes increasingly robust on single robots, the next challenge is to extend these techniques to large teams of robots. In this talk I will give an overview of our approach to multi-robot exploration and mapping, which we developed within the CentiBOTS project. This project aimed at fielding 100 robots in an indoor exploration and surveillance task.

A general solution to distributed exploration must consider some difficult issues, including limited communication between robots, no assumptions about relative start locations of the robots, and dynamic assignments of processing tasks. The focus of this talk will be on our current solutions to the problems of robot localization, map building, and coordinated exploration. As part of the CentiBots project, our system was evaluated rigorously by an outside team. We present results from this evaluation that demonstrate that the system is highly robust and that the maps generated by our robots are more accurate than maps generated by a human.