Abstract
Exploration is a core challenge for RoboCup Rescue. So-called communicative exploration is a novel strategy for multi-robot exploration that unlike other approaches takes the limits of wireless communication systems into account. Here, previous results that where achieved for a team of robots linked to a basestation are significantly extended to also cover robot packs, i.e., multi-robot teams that are not permanently tied to an operator’s station. Unlike teams that are constrained by the immobility of a basestation, packs can explore arbitrarily large regions. Results from experiments with packs of 4, 5 and 6 robots are presented. The new strategy constantly maintains the communication between the robots while exploring, whereas the commonly used frontier-based exploration strategy, which is used in the experiments as comparison to our approach, leads to a rapid loss of communication.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Arkin, R.C.: Cooperation without communication: Multiagent schema-based robot navigation. Journal of Robotic Systems 9(3), 351–364 (1992)
Birk, A., Carpin, S., Kenn, H.: The IUB 2003 rescue robot team. In: Polani, D., Browning, B., Bonarini, A., Yoshida, K. (eds.) RoboCup 2003. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3020. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Burgard, W., Fox, D., Moors, M., Simmons, R., Thrun, S.: Collaborative multi-robot exploration. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (2000)
Birk, A., Kenn, H., Pfingsthorn, M.: The iub rescue robots: From webcams to lifesavers. In: 1st International Workshop on Advances in Service Robotics (ASER 2003) (2003)
Birk, A., Kenn, H., Rooker, M., Akhil, A., Vlad, B.H., Nina, B., Christoph, B.-S., Vinod, D., Dumitru, E., Ioan, H., Aakash, J., Premvir, J., Benjamin, L., Gediminas, L., James, M., Andreas, P., Max, P., Kristina, S., Jormquan, S., Julian, W.: The IUB 2002 rescue robot team. In: Kaminka, G.A., Lima, P.U., Rojas, R. (eds.) RoboCup 2002. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2752. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Johnson, D.B., Maltz, D.A., Hu, Y.-C.: The dynamic source routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks (dsr), IETF Internet Draft, draft-ietf-manet-dsr-10.txt (July 2004)
Johnson, D.B., Waltz, D.A.: Dynamic source routing in ad-hoc wireless networks. In: Imielinski, T., Korth, H. (eds.) Mobile Computing, pp. 153–181. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (1996)
Moravec, H., Elfes, A.: High resolution maps from wide angle sonar. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 116–121 (1985)
Makarenko, A.A., Williams, S.B., Bourgault, F., Durrant-Whyte, H.F.: An experiment in integrated exploration. In: IEEE/RSJ Intl. Workshop on Intelligent Robots and Systems (2002)
O’Hara, B., Petrick, A.: The IEEE 802.11 Handbook: A Designer’s Companion. In: Standards Information Network. IEEE Press, Los Alamitos (1999)
Parker, L.E.: ALLIANCE: an architecture for fault tolerant multirobot cooperation. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation 14(2), 220–240 (2002)
Perkins, C.E.: Ad Hoc Networking. Addison Wesley Professional, Reading (2000)
Park, J.-A., Park, S.-K., Kim, D.-H., Cho, P.-D., Cho, K.-R.: Experiments on radio interference between wireless lan and other radio devices on a 2.4 ghz ism band. In: The 57th IEEE Semiannual Vehicular Technology Conference, vol. 3, pp. 1798–1801 (2003)
Rooker, M., Birk, A.: Combining exploration and ad-hoc networking in robocup rescue. In: Nardi, D., Riedmiller, M., Sammut, C., Santos-Victor, J. (eds.) RoboCup 2004. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3276, pp. 236–246. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Murphy, R.R., Casper, J., Micire, M.: Potential tasks and research issues for mobile robots in roboCup rescue. In: Stone, P., Balch, T., Kraetzschmar, G.K. (eds.) RoboCup 2000. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2019, p. 339. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Royer, E.M., Toh, C.-K.: A review of current routing protocols for ad-hoc mobile wireless networks. IEEE Personal Communications Magazine, 46–55 (April 1999)
Snyder, R.G.: Robots assist in search and rescue efforts at wtc. IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine 8(4), 26–28 (2001)
Yamauchi, B.: A frontier-based approach for autonomous exploration. In: Proceedings of the 1997 IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automoiaton, pp. 146–151 (July 1997)
Yamauchi, B.: Frontier-based exploration using multiple robots. In: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 1998), pp. 47–53 (May 1998)
Zelinsky, A.: A mobile robot exploration algorithm. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation 8(6) (1992)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Rooker, M.N., Birk, A. (2006). Communicative Exploration with Robot Packs. In: Bredenfeld, A., Jacoff, A., Noda, I., Takahashi, Y. (eds) RoboCup 2005: Robot Soccer World Cup IX. RoboCup 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4020. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11780519_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11780519_24
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-35437-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-35438-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)