Meeting-Merging-Mission: A Multi-robot Coordinate Framework for Large-Scale Communication-Limited Exploration

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive multi-robot exploration framework that effectively manages communication constraints through environment modeling, cooperative strategies, and path planning, validated on real-world multi-robot platforms.

Contribution

The framework integrates environment presentation, cooperative exploration, and path planning tailored for communication-limited scenarios, demonstrating practicality and versatility.

Findings

Effective exploration under communication restrictions

Successful deployment on multi-UGV and multi-UAV systems

Robustness demonstrated through extensive benchmarking

Abstract

This letter presents a complete framework Meeting-Merging-Mission for multi-robot exploration under communication restriction. Considering communication is limited in both bandwidth and range in the real world, we propose a lightweight environment presentation method and an efficient cooperative exploration strategy. For lower bandwidth, each robot utilizes specific polytopes to maintains free space and super frontier information (SFI) as the source for exploration decision-making. To reduce repeated exploration, we develop a mission-based protocol that drives robots to share collected information in stable rendezvous. We also design a complete path planning scheme for both centralized and decentralized cases. To validate that our framework is practical and generic, we present an extensive benchmark and deploy our system into multi-UGV and multi-UAV platforms.