A Novel Strategy for Distributed Multi-robot Coordination in Area Exploration

A reliable and efficient multi-robot coordination strategy is proposed to accomplish area exploration task in unknown environment. This approach is an improved one based on social potential field (SPF) model and market-based (MD) approach to coordinate the movement of multiple robots. Unlike traditional SPF, our model is a non-continuous one in time. In this approach, non-continuous SPF and market-driven approach are used for global coordination to provide movement direction and goal location for every robot, and robots run towards goal locations by local path planning. To gain optimized global scheme, a global evaluation function is proposed as constraints, accordingly. Simulation experiments results show the effectiveness of this approach, and local minima can be avoided in advance in a great degree.