With the advent of latest technical advancements in the field of robotics, a stage has arrived where autonomous robots are expected to help humans in tasks that are either dangerous or too monotonous such as mining, search and rescue, floor cleaning. All these problems are derivatives of coverage problem wherein the motto is complete coverage of the environment in a time effective manner. Most of the coverage methods developed till date have access to the map prior to exploration and only few of them made use of multiple robots. In view of the drawbacks of the existing approaches, we developed a frontier based multi robot approach for coverage of unknown environments where map building and exploration is done simultaneously. Individual maps from the robots are merged to form a global map. Frontiers which are the boundaries between explored and unexplored areas are identified and the robots are navigated toward frontiers using the proposed exploration strategy. Robot operating System (ROS) is used for implementation and Stage is used for simulating robots and their environments. Simulation results are obtained for proposed approach and are compared with various existing exploration strategies.
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