A behaviour-based optimisation strategy for multi-robot exploration

To efficiently explore an unknown environment with a team of robots, a coordinated strategy that maximises the exploration area is required. This is a difficult optimisation problem, as there may exist many suboptimal solutions. In order to reduce the search space to a region that is near the optimal, a behaviour-based exploration strategy is used to define the region in which an optimal solution can be found. A numerical optimisation technique is then used to find the solution in this region. In particular, the proposed strategy uses a potential-fields technique to obtain a coarse movement direction for each robot. A nonlinear optimisation method is then used to calculate the velocity and angle deviation from the coarse direction to achieve the maximum exploration for each move. Simulation results have shown that the proposed method provides an efficient exploration strategy.