Coordinated Multi-Robot Real-Time Exploration With Connectivity and Bandwidth Awareness

While there has been substantial progress for multi-robot exploration of an unknown area, little attention has been given to communication, especially bandwidth constraints in time-sensitive and bandwidth-consuming tasks such as search and surveillance. In such tasks, video/audio streams of a newly explored area should be sent back to the base station in a timely manner. To address this issue, the authors propose Connectivity and Bandwidth Aware eXploration (CBAX), which is an efficient iteration based real-time exploration. CBAX divides the problem into frontier node placement, relay node placement with routing path selection, and the match of each robot with its target position.