Output details
13 - Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Metallurgy and Materials
Sheffield Hallam University
An Approach to Multi-robot Site Exploration Based on Principles of Self-organisation
The paper presents an implementation of an approach to multi-robot site exploration and map building which considers the robot team as a self-organising system. The work was conducted within the EU-funded GUARDIANS programme. The system consists of an heterogeneous robot swarm, a mobile ad-hoc network and an evolving topological map of the environment. The method results in a reasonable sketch of the environment which can be further developed to a full metric map and used as the basis of building ad-hoc mobile wireless communication and sensor networks. The algorithms presented here also take into consideration practical aspects such as sensor limitation. The algorithms are tested on a group of Khepera III robots, specially upgraded to fulfil the needs of the approach.