Multi-robot area exploration with limited-range communications

This paper proposes a reliable and efficient multi-robot coordination algorithm to accomplish an area exploration task given that the communication range of each robot is limited. This algorithm is based on a distributed bidding model to coordinate the movement of multiple robots. Two measures are developed to accommodate the limited-range communications. First, the distances between robots are considered in the bidding algorithm so that the robots tend to stay close to each other. Second, a novel coding mechanism is introduced in the map representation to reduce the exchanged data volume when new communication links are formed. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the use of the nearness measure in the coordination algorithm as well as the new coding mechanism to reduce the amount of map data exchanged. By handling the limited communication range we can make the coordination algorithms more practical in multi-robot applications.