Cooperative multi-robot navigation, exploration, mapping and object detection with ROS

This article describes WAMbot, a multi-robot system designed to navigate, explore and map large-scale urban environments while performing visual object recognition. The system can be easily adapted and deployed into a variety of scenarios such as search and rescue or surveillance. The original WAMbot system was developed for the Multi Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge in 2010 (MAGIC 2010). It successfully passed a competitive down-selection process and placed 4th in the final challenge. Our ongoing work has been to modularize the WAMbot system further, and standardize it using the open source Robot Operating System (ROS) software framework. We describe the core components, or stacks, in the new WAMbot system including: 1) a large-scale mapping stack capable of building 500×500m global maps from over 20 robots in real-time, 2) an efficient, frontier-based multi-robot exploration stack, 3) a navigation stack including a centralized global planner with decentralized local navigation and 4) an intuitive graph-based visual object recognition pipeline.