Exploration Algorithms by Multiple Robots in Challenged Communication Environment

Information collecting and sharing technologies in disaster areas is important, especially, collecting and sharing information of the damaged location and injured people in a building is important for prompt rescue operation. For that purpose, a method to build up a map of an unknown environment without a priori knowledge is necessary. However, as a map must be explored by multiple autonomous robots under the poor wireless communication environment such as inside a damaged building, it is not easy to design an efficient exploration algorithm. In this paper, we propose exploration algorithms by multiple robots based on the store-carry-forward scheme which is one of information sharing methods for the challenged communication environment. The numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithms efficiently explore a map.