Research On The Cooperation Algorithm Of Multi-Robot Exploration

With the development of science and technology, the robotics research has been extended from manufacturing industry to many different domains such as aerospace & aviation, military application and so on. Robots should carry out their work autonomously in some environments, where human beings can not enter, for example, the hazardous mine and nucleus relics. Robots should explore the environments and execute different intelligence tasks by themselves. Autonomous exploration is the premier task for map-building and various intelligence tasks. Thus, autonomous exploration has important meaning in practice application. Moreover, multi-robot system has a lot of advantages compared to the single-robot system. However, to choose the exploration algorithm to the multi-robot system is much more difficult than to the single-robot system. In this paper, we try to research the exploration algorithm of the multi-robot system in the completely unknown environment and the cooperation algorithm between the robots.Firstly, the introduction reviews the research on multi-robot exploration and its relative aspects in the world. And the background and the main contents of this dissertation are described briefly.Secondly, more and more researchers attempt to adopt the theories in the other fields to robotics, such as economics and marketing mechanism. This paper give a quick review about this, and then, present a novel auction algorithm based on the contact net protocol of the multi-agent theory. After the introduction of the multi-agent system and the contact net protocol, we use this algorithm to the multi-robot system. Let the different robots to act the different role, and this can make the exploration be a distributive progress. Meanwhile, the algorithm is proved to have more tolerance and robustness. An open simulation platform for robot exploration is developed to satisfy the research purposes. And the algorithm mentioned above is used in this platform. It is proved to be effective. Thirdly, the potential field theory is one of the mature artificial intelligent algorithms, but most are used in the solution of the path planning and obstacle avoidance. The background of applying most probably is a known environment. However, in this study, it is used in the robot exploration of the completely unknown environment. In the unknown environment described by the grid map, based on the conception of the frontier, the potential field theory is used in this study. The repulsive force from the obstacles and the attract force from the frontiers to the robots are given out, and are used to decide the direction of the robot in every step. Compared to the single-robot system, the repulsive force between tow nearby robots is adopted in the multi-robot system. And it makes the cooperation effective in the multi-robot system in the exploration progress. Compared to the method that decides the destination using some complicated decision algorithm, this algorithm needs less computation, and the exploration efficiency is also enhanced. Moreover, the simulation experiment about this algorithm is realized in the platform. The result of the simulation improves the efficient of the algorithm in single and multi-robot system exploration.Finally, conclusions are given with recommendation for future work.