Human interest oriented heterogeneous multi-robot exploration under connectivity constraints

Human interest input could greatly enhance the efficiency of the multi-robot exploration. However, most of the previous work did not take the intention of the operator into account. In this paper, a human interest oriented multi-robot exploration system is designed. The system is composed of a mobile base station and several robot explorers. A human interest oriented task allocation method is developed to enable these robot explorers to coordinate based on the operator´s intention. Furthermore, an optimization index is proposed to balance the obedience, connectivity and explorability of the system; and the optimization problem is solved to generate the movements of the mobile base station and the robot explorers. Simulations and real-world experiments have demonstrate the effectiveness of the system and the efficiency of the exploration process.