Asynchronous multirobot exploration under recurrent connectivity constraints

Abstract

In multirobot exploration under centralized control, communication plays an important role in constraining the team exploration strategy. Recurrent connectivity is a way to define communication constraints for which robots must connect to a base station only when making new observations. This paper studies effective multirobot exploration strategies under recurrent connectivity by considering a centralized and asynchronous planning framework. We formalize the problem of selecting the optimal set of locations robots should reach, provide an exact formulation to solve it, and devise an approximation algorithm to obtain efficient solutions with a bounded loss of optimality. Experiments in simulation and on real robots evaluate our approach in a number of settings.

An Auto-Adaptive Multi-Objective Strategy for Multi-Robot Exploration of Constrained-Communication Environments

“…Another centralised but asynchronous strategy is followed in [19,37] in order to address the problem of multi-robot exploration under recurrent connectivity. In these works, the authors leverage a variant of the Steiner tree problem that appears as a particular case of different known graph optimisation problems.…”

“…To this end, the authors model the exploration and mapping problem as a POMDP that is solved centrally. In [19] the assignment algorithm works in an asynchronous fashion assuming that not all robots must be ready for new plans at the same time.…”

Multirobot Reconnection on Graphs: Problem, Complexity, and Algorithms

“…The approaches outlined above, in which mission objectives are jointly optimized with reconnection requirements, might, in some cases, over-constrain robots' movements [1], [2], [4], [5], [7], [9]- [11] potentially resulting in reductions of performance. Even relaxing the communication constraints, effective trade-offs between the satisfaction of reconnection constraints and other mission objectives might be hard to obtain [6], [8].…”

A review on multi-robot systems categorised by application domain

“…The coordination of such a system brings about many challenges, particularly those related to connectivity and battery-life problems. In [43] Banfi et al address the problem of communication constraint by proposing an exploration strategy under recurrent connectivity. The robots only need to connect to the base station if new observations are made, hence allowing the members to disconnect for long periods of time until new information is obtained.…”