Evaluation of different frontier-based multi-robot exploration strategies

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the problem of exploring an unknown environment by a team of mobile robots. The main objective is to compare four different coordination strategies based on frontier concept (boundaries between unexplored and explored open areas) and analyze their performance in term of assignment quality, overall exploration time and computational complexity. In order to provide a suitable qualitative study we used three optimization criteria. Each strategy has been implemented and tested extensively in computerized simulation.