Qingchen Bi , Xuebo Zhang* , Jian Wen , Zhangchao Pan , Shiyong Zhang , Runhua Wang , Jing Yuan.  CURE: A Hierarchical Framework for Multi-Robot Autonomous Exploration Inspired by Centroids of Unknown Regions. IEEE Transactions on Automoation Science and Engineering (T-ASE), 2023, accepted.

Abstract

     In this paper, a novel multi-robot autonomous exploration approach CURE is proposed based on dynamic Voronoi diagrams and centroids of unknown connected regions. Compared with existing approaches, the novelty of this work is twofold: 1) Dynamic Voronoi diagram is used for partition of the space being explored to improve the efffciency of multirobot exploration, and then a new parameter-insensitive utility function is elaborately designed to evaluate the information of centroids, which helps guide the robot to explore unknown regions. 2) A hierarchical framework consisting of global and local exploration windows for detecting centroids is designed, wherein the global exploration window is activated to find centroids to guide the robot exploration when there are no centroids in any one local exploration window. We validate the feasibility and exploration efficiency of the proposed approach in various complex simulation scenarios and challenging realworld tasks. All test results show that the exploration time consumption and path cost are reduced by up to 50.7% and 34.4%, respectively, compared with an advanced RRT-based multi-robot exploration approach. (Supplementary video link: https://youtu.be/P5jXKlGQOec)