Atlas: Exploration and Mapping with a Sparse Swarm of Networked IoT Robots

Abstract

Exploration and mapping is a fundamental capability of a swarm of robots: robots enter an unknown area, explore it, and collectively build a map of it. This capability is important regardless of whether the robots are crawling, flying, or swimming. Existing exploration and mapping algorithms tend to either be inefficient, or rely on having a dense swarm of robots. This paper introduces Atlas, an exploration and mapping algorithm for sparse swarms of robots, which completes a full exploration even in the extreme case of a single robot. We develop an open-source simulator and show that Atlas outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of exploration speed and completeness of the resulting map.