Collaborative robots for indoor environment exploration

The design and implementation of a robot team consisting of three homogeneous mobile robots and an external server is presented. The main goal of the robot team is the updating of a map or representation of an indoor environment. A scheme for collective exploration was defined. This scheme enables robots to navigate and self-locate within an indoor environment, communicate to each other, create local maps of their environment to be merged into a global map, and coordinate individual actions in order to explore autonomously the environment. Finally, the performance of the robot team was evaluated in various environmental conditions.