Decentralized cooperative exploration: Implementation and experiments

We present an implementation of the SRG method, a decentralized cooperative exploration strategy. In this method, a roadmap of the explored area with the associate safe region is stored in a compact data structure, called Sensor-based Random Graph (SRG). No task decomposition and/or allocation is performed. The roadmap is incrementally built through a simple decentralized mechanism: each robot moves towards its local frontier to access areas that, on the basis of the available information, appear to be unexplored by the rest of the team. A detailed description of the software architecture used to implement the strategy is given. Preliminary experiments with a team of Khepera III robots are presented to show the performance of the proposed technique.