and Mapping

62 coMMunicATions of ThE AcM | MARCh 2013 | Vol. 56 | No. 3 contributed articles Ur ban reConnaissanCe and search-and-rescue missions are ideal candidates for multi-robot teams due to the potential hazard the missions pose to humans and the inherent parallelism that can be exploited by teams of cooperating robots. However, these domains also involve challenging problems due to having to work in complex, stochastic, and partially observable environments. In particular, non-uniform and cluttered terrain in unknown environments is a challenge for both state-estimation and control, resulting in complicated planning and perception problems. Limited and unreliable communications further complicate coordination among individual agents and their hu-man operators. To help address the problems, the Multi-Autonomous Ground robot In-ternational Challenge (MAGIC), hel