3D Multi-Robot Exploration with a Two-Level Coordination Strategy and Prioritization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a distributed 3D multi-robot exploration framework for uneven terrains, utilizing a two-level coordination strategy, next-best-view sampling, and priority-based exploration, with applications in coverage and real-time conflict management.

Contribution

It adapts a two-level coordination strategy to 3D multi-robot exploration, enabling conflict management and priority-based navigation in complex terrains.

Findings

Effective conflict minimization in multi-robot exploration

Priority-based exploration enhances target area coverage

Open-source implementation available for benchmarking

Abstract

This work presents a 3D multi-robot exploration framework for a team of UGVs moving on uneven terrains. The framework was designed by casting the two-level coordination strategy presented in [1] into the context of multi-robot exploration. The resulting distributed exploration technique minimizes and explicitly manages the occurrence of conflicts and interferences in the robot team. Each robot selects where to scan next by using a receding horizon next-best-view approach [2]. A sampling-based tree is directly expanded on segmented traversable regions of the terrain 3D map to generate the candidate next viewpoints. During the exploration, users can assign locations with higher priorities on-demand to steer the robot exploration toward areas of interest. The proposed framework can be also used to perform coverage tasks in the case a map of the environment is a priori provided as input. An open-source implementation is available online.