Coordinated multi-robot real-time exploration with connectivity and bandwidth awareness

— While there has been substantial progress for multi-robot exploration of an unknown area, little attention has been given to communication, especially bandwidth constraints in time-sensitive and bandwidth-consuming tasks such as search and surveillance. In such tasks, video/audio streams of a newly explored area should be sent back to the base station in a timely manner. To address this issue, we propose Connectivity and Bandwidth Aware eXploration (CBAX), which is an efficient iteration based real-time exploration. CBAX divides the problem into frontier node placement, relay node placement with routing path selection, and the match of each robot with its target position. Moreover, we model bandwidth-constrained relay node placement into a new variant of the Steiner Minimum Tree problem and present our solution. While reducing the exploration time, CBAX maintains the network’s connectivity and ensures the aggregated data flows are under the link capacity in transmission. Simula...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: Yuanteng Pei, Matt W. Mutka, Ning Xi
• Keywords: CBAX, Exploration, ICRA 2010, Node Placement, Robotics