Integrating planned and reactive behaviors for exploration coordination of multi-robot systems

摘要

To realize efficient exploration, a novel coordinated algorithm which integrated planned and reactive behaviors is proposed in this paper. The planned behaviors realize dispersion of robots over an environment, cooperation among robots and task assignments to robots. The behaviors are discussed from a case that the robot team size equals four in a kind of obstacle free environments. Afterwards, the behaviors are used to coordinate robot team with any size by utilizing a concept of compound robot. Reactive behaviors are used to deal with appearance of different outline obstacles in a kind of sparsely occupied environments. Then, a finite state machine is utilized to integrate these behaviors. For the two kinds of environments, robots conduct a set of zigzag and distorted zigzag trajectories, respectively. Finally, the results are validated by computer simulations.