Abstract:
Control strategies for mapping of unknown
environments require a tradeoff between
exploration and accuracy. One approach to
balance these conflicting requirements is to use
schema based behaviours to provide a means of
exploration and manipulate the parameters
controlling such schema to maintain the desired
localisation and mapping accuracy. This paper
provides such a behaviour based strategy for
multi-robot exploration. Beyond the coordination
of forces attracting agents to unexplored frontiers
and repulsing against obstacles, as well as fellow
agents, the proposed reactive approach is
coupled with frontier based path planning to
escape local minma otherwise encountered in a
solely potential field based solution. The
proposed behaviour based approach is designed
so that it can be augmented to moderate
movement based on criteria such as localisation
accuracy in mapping applications. One planned
application is the integration of proposed
mechanism with probabilistic filtering for the
mapping of indoor environments.
