Multi-robot exploration strategies for tactical tasks in urban environments

Mobile robots are already widely used by first responders both in civilian and military operations. Our current goal is to provide the human team with all the information available from an unknown environment quickly and accurate. Also, the robots need to explore autonomous because tele-operating more than two robots is very difficult and demands one person per robot to do it. In this paper the authors describe the results of several experiments on behalf of the MAST CTA. Our exploration strategies developed for the experiments use from two to nine robots which sharing information are able to explore and map an unknown environment. Each robot has a local map of the environment and transmit the measurements information to a central computer which fusion all the data to make a global map. This computer called map coordinator send exploration goals to the robot teams in order to explore the environment in the fastest way available. The performance of our exploration strategies were evaluated in different scenarios and tested in two different mobile robot platforms.