Coordinating Multiple Robots during Exploration under Communication with Limited bandwidth

In this paper, we consider the problem of exploring an unknown environment with a team of mobile robots using a communication link with limited bandwidth. The key problem to be solved in this context is to decide which information should be transmitted over the network to enable the robots to choose appropriate target points. In this paper, each robot approximates its map by a set of polygons. We present an efficient way to incrementally improve the representation. We furthermore adapt an existing coordination strategy so that it is able to deal with our approximated maps in a distributed fashion. Our technique has been implemented and tested. The results demonstrate that our distributed technique can efficiently spread the robots in the environment even if the communication link provides only a low bandwidth. As a result, the robots are able to quickly accomplish their exploration mission despite the constraints introduced by the limited bandwidth