COOPERATIVE EXPLORATION WITH MULTIPLE ROBOTS USING LOW BANDWIDTH COMMUNICATION

In this paper, we consider the problem of exploring an un-known environment with a team of mobile robots. In this context, we assume that the robots have only a low band-width communication link. The key problem to be solved in this context is to decide which information should be trans-mitted over the network to enable the other team mates to choose appropriate target points. In this paper, each robot approximates its representation of the environment by a set of polygons. We present an efficient way to incrementally improve that kind of maps. We furthermore adapt an ex-isting coordination strategy so that it is able to deal with our approximated representations in a distributed fashion. Our technique has been implemented and tested. The re-sults demonstrate that our distributed technique can effi-ciently spread the robots over the environment even if the communication link provides only a low bandwidth. As a result, the robots are able to quickly accomplish their ex-ploration mission despite the constraints introduced by the limited bandwidth. 1