Meeting-Merging-Mission: A Multi-robot Coordinate Framework for Large-Scale Communication-Limited Exploration
This addresses coordination challenges for multi-robot systems in communication-limited environments like disaster zones or industrial inspections, though it appears incremental.
The authors tackled multi-robot exploration under communication constraints by proposing a lightweight environment representation and cooperative strategy, achieving reduced repeated exploration through mission-based protocols and validating it on UGV/UAV platforms.
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.