Multi-robot complete exploration using hill climbing and topological recovery

This article addresses the problem of autonomous map building and exploration of an unknown environment with mobile robots. The proposed method assumes that mobile robots use occupancy grid maps as the main representation model for the built maps and a hill climbing local search algorithm for exploring the environment without any kind of human intervention. It is demonstrated that hill climbing based exploration may recover from local minima and cover completely any environment, if a topological representation of the environment is created incrementally along the mapping and exploration mission. The approach is devised for either a single mobile robot or multiple cooperative mobile robots.