This article describes “WAMbot,'' an autonomous unmanned ground vehicle and the Team MAGICian solution to the 2010 Multi Autonomous Ground‐robotic International Challenge (MAGIC). The system architecture, hardware, sensing, planning, navigation, mapping systems, and user interface were specifically designed to address the demands of the large‐scale distributed reconnaissance and surveillance task presented in the challenge. The resulting system was selected as a finalist and ultimately placed 4th in MAGIC 2010. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This paper presents different approaches to fully autonomous exploration of unknown terrain for individual as well as groups of mobile robots. All algorithms have been tested on a simulation environment and verified on the real robot platform WAMbot, the West Australian entry for the MAGIC2010 robot challenge, based on Pioneer 3 AT robots, augmented by various sensor systems.

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