Description

This book provides strategies for multiple vehicles to explore unknown environments in a cooperative and systematic manner. These strategies are called Simultaneous Cooperative Exploration and Networking (SCENT) strategies. As the basis for development of SCENT strategies, we first tackle the motion control and planning for one vehicle with range sensors. In particular, we develop the curve-tracking controllers for autonomous vehicles with rigidly mounted range sensors, and a provably complete exploration strategy is proposed so that one vehicle with range sensors builds a topological map of an environment. The SCENT algorithms introduced in this book extend the exploration strategy for one vehicle to multiple vehicles. As the result of the SCENT algorithms, an information network is created concurrently with a topological map of an environment. The resulting network and the topological map are then used to solve coordinated multi-robot tasks, such as capturing intruders. The efficiency of the proposed SCENT algorithms is verified through theoretical investigations as well as experiments using mobile robots.