Decentralized cooperative exploration: Implementation and experiments

In this paper we present implementation and experiments of a decentralized cooperative exploration strategy developed by our research group. The exploration strategy is based on the construction of a roadmap of the explored area, with the associate safe region. No task decomposition/allocation is performed. The roadmap is incrementally built through a simple and efficient decentralized cooperation mechanism: each robot biases its exploration towards its local frontier, i.e., local areas which appear to be unexplored by the whole robot team on the basis of the exchanged information. A detailed description of the software architecture used to implement the strategy is given. Experiments with a team of Khepera III robots are presented to show the performance of the proposed technique.