Communicative exploration with robot packs

Abstract. Exploration is a core challenge for RoboCup Rescue. Socalled communicative exploration is a novel strategy for multi-robot exploration that unlike other approaches takes the limits of wireless communication systems into account. Here, previous results that where achieved for a team of robots linked to a basestation are significantly extended to also cover robot packs, i.e., multi-robot teams that are not permanently tied to an operator’s station. Unlike teams that are constrained by the immobility of a basestation, packs can explore arbitrarily large regions. Results from experiments with packs of 4, 5 and 6 robots are presented. The new strategy constantly maintains the communication between the robots while exploring, whereas the commonly used frontier-based exploration strategy, which is used in the experiments as comparison to our approach, leads to a rapid loss of communication. Final Versio