WiSER-X: Wireless Signals-based Efficient Decentralized Multi-Robot Exploration without Explicit Information Exchange

TL;DR

WiSER-X is a decentralized multi-robot exploration algorithm that uses wireless signals for local communication, reducing overlap and enabling asynchronous termination without shared maps, adaptable to failures and heterogeneous robots.

Contribution

WiSER-X introduces a novel wireless signal-based method for decentralized exploration that minimizes communication needs and handles failures without shared maps.

Findings

58% lower overlap than baseline without info sharing

23% more overlap than full info sharing baseline

Validated through hardware experiments

Abstract

We introduce a Wireless Signal based Efficient multi-Robot eXploration (WiSER-X) algorithm applicable to a decentralized team of robots exploring an unknown environment with communication bandwidth constraints. WiSER-X relies only on local inter-robot relative position estimates, that can be obtained by exchanging signal pings from onboard sensors such as WiFi, Ultra-Wide Band, amongst others, to inform the exploration decisions of individual robots to minimize redundant coverage overlaps. Furthermore, WiSER-X also enables asynchronous termination without requiring a shared map between the robots. It also adapts to heterogeneous robot behaviors and even complete failures in unknown environment while ensuring complete coverage. Simulations show that WiSER-X leads to 58% lower overlap than a zero-information-sharing baseline algorithm-1 and only 23% more overlap than a full-information-sharing algorithm baseline algorithm-2. Hardware experiments further validate the feasibility of WiSER-X using full onboard sensing.