Multi-robot informative path planning in unknown environments through continuous region partitioning

Authors

Ayan Dutta, University of North FloridaFollow
Amitabh Bhattacharya, University of North FloridaFollow
O. Patrick Kreidl, University of North FloridaFollow
Anirban Ghosh, University of North FloridaFollow
Prithviraj Dasgupta, Naval Research Laboratory

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2020

Abstract

We consider the NP-hard problem of multirobot informative path planning in the presence of communication constraints, where the objective is to collect higher amounts of information of an ambient phenomenon. We propose a novel approach that uses continuous region partitioning into Voronoi components to efficiently divide an initially unknown environment among the robots based on newly discovered obstacles enabling improved load balancing between robots. Simulation results show that our proposed approach is successful in reducing the initial imbalance of the robots’ allocated free regions while ensuring close-to-reality spatial modeling within a reasonable amount of time.

Publication Title

International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems

Volume

17

Issue

6

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1177/1729881420970461

ISSN

17298806

E-ISSN

17298814

Citation Information

Dutta, A., Bhattacharya, A., Kreidl, O. P., Ghosh, A., & Dasgupta, P. (2020). Multi-robot informative path planning in unknown environments through continuous region partitioning. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems. https://doi.org/10.1177/1729881420970461