Cooperative exploration strategy for micro-aerial vehicles fleet

Abstract

In this paper, the problem of the exploration of an unknown environment by deploying a fleet of Micro-Aerial Vehicles (MAV) is considered. As a single robot has already proven its efficiency for this task, the challenge is to extend it to a multi-robots system to reduce the exploration time. For this purpose, a cooperative navigation strategy is proposed based on a specific utility function and inter-robots data exchange. The novelty comes from the exchange of the frontiers points instead of maps, which allows to reduce computation and data amount within the network. The proposed system has been implemented and tested under ROS using the Gazebo simulator. The results demonstrate that the proposed navigation strategy efficiently spreads robots over the environment for a faster exploration.