Multi-robot cooperative systems for exploration : advances in dealing with constrained communication environments

Abstract

In the present document, the authors introduce the Cooperative Exploration problem as well as the most relevant approaches in order to show the most common drawbacks and opportunities to improve the state of art solutions. Subsequently, a preliminary version of a multi-robot exploration proposal is described. The first results obtained in simulated scenarios support the underlying ideas are feasible and promising. They show that is possible to cope with real communication constraints (always present in practice), being more fault tolerant and still having good performance regarding the total exploration time. Next steps to fully implement a more reliable and robust system are discussed.