# Decentralized Multi-Floor Exploration by a Swarm of Miniature Robots Teaming with Wall-Climbing Units

## TL;DR

This paper presents a decentralized multi-robot system combining ground and wall-climbing units for efficient multi-floor exploration in dynamic environments, emphasizing scalability, robustness, and fully distributed mapping.

## Contribution

It introduces a heterogeneous multi-robot system with scalable, robust, and flexible properties, enabling multi-floor exploration with fully distributed maps and cooperative path planning.

## Key findings

- System demonstrates consistent scalability and robustness in dynamic environments.
- Units can be injected during operation without performance loss.
- Distributed maps support effective multi-floor exploration.

## Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of collectively exploring unknown and dynamic environments with a decentralized heterogeneous multi-robot system consisting of multiple units of two variants of a miniature robot. The first variant-a wheeled ground unit-is at the core of a swarm of floor-mapping robots exhibiting scalability, robustness and flexibility. These properties are systematically tested and quantitatively evaluated in unstructured and dynamic environments, in the absence of any supporting infrastructure. The results of repeated sets of experiments show a consistent performance for all three features, as well as the possibility to inject units into the system while it is operating. Several units of the second variant-a wheg-based wall-climbing unit-are used to support the swarm of mapping robots when simultaneously exploring multiple floors by expanding the distributed communication channel necessary for the coordinated behavior among platforms. Although the occupancy-grid maps obtained can be large, they are fully distributed. Not a single robotic unit possesses the overall map, which is not required by our cooperative path-planning strategy.