Decentralised Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance in Unknown Environments with Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a decentralized multi-robot system for ISR tasks in unknown environments, integrating heterogeneous robots with specialized functions for exploration and data collection, demonstrated through simulation and hardware experiments.

Contribution

It presents a novel decentralized multi-robot architecture with heterogeneous capabilities for ISR in unknown environments, including implementation and experimental validation.

Findings

Effective decentralized localisation and mapping achieved

Successful simulation of coordinated exploration and data fusion

Progress in hardware deployment with UAS platform

Abstract

We present the design and implementation of a decentralised, heterogeneous multi-robot system for performing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) in an unknown environment. The team consists of functionally specialised robots that gather information and others that perform a mission-specific task, and is coordinated to achieve simultaneous exploration and exploitation in the unknown environment. We present a practical implementation of such a system, including decentralised inter-robot localisation, mapping, data fusion and coordination. The system is demonstrated in an efficient distributed simulation. We also describe an UAS platform for hardware experiments, and the ongoing progress.