Exploration and Mapping with Groups of Robots: Recent Trends
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GROUP ROBOTICS (M GINI AND F AMIGONI, SECTION EDITORS)
Exploration and Mapping with Groups of Robots: Recent Trends Alberto Quattrini Li 1
# Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Purpose of Review Multi-robot exploration—i.e., the problem of mapping unknown features of an environment—is fundamental in many tasks, including search and rescue, planetary exploration, and environmental monitoring. This article surveys recent literature with the aim at identifying current research trends, open challenges, and future directions. Recent Findings Since the first formalization of the exploration problem, current research has extended systems and algorithms to map 3D environments and more complex phenomena and considered real-world constraints. Deep learning-based approaches have seen some preliminary applications in decision-making. Summary While current research has been progressing towards systems that can work in the real world, long-term exploration in large unstructured environments with complex phenomena to map is still an open problem. This introduces opportunities for exciting research, including but not limited to generalized frameworks that bridge the gap between theory and practice, learningbased approaches, and robustness to failure and attacks, so that robots can be deployed safely in real-world environments. Keywords Exploration . Mapping . Multi-robot systems
Introduction The objective of this paper is to provide a snapshot on current significant trends and to highlight challenges and open problems that define future research directions, on robotics exploration. Robotics exploration is intended as the problem of controlling a single robot or a group of robots in gaining knowledge about features in an environment [1]—see Fig. 1 for two exploration examples. This problem has been considered a fundamental enabler for many applications, including but not limited to planetary exploration [3], environmental monitoring [4], and search and rescue [5], where environments might not be easily accessible by humans. In general, it is a way to achieve a true autonomous robotic system able to operate in unknown environments. Exploration has been studied since at least the 1980s, leading to mature methods for building 2D maps of the physical environment that are structured and without dynamic obstacles [6]. Exploration
This article is part of the Topical Collection on Group Robotics * Alberto Quattrini Li [email protected] 1
Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA
considered more broadly as discovering any type of features in the environment, in challenging scenarios, e.g., caves and underwater, and considering practical constraints, such as battery charge and communication, is still an open research problem with continued active current research. This article discusses some of the recent results on exploration towards practical systems that can work in challenging environments. Formally, the problem is defined as follows: given a team of m robots R = {r1,
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