DCARE: Decentralized Collaborative Autonomous Robotic Exploration

Autonomous exploration of complex unknown environment challenges the intelligent perception and navigation abilities of unmanned system. Traditional single-robot method suffers from low efficiency and low risk resistance capacity. This paper introduces a decentralized multi-robot autonomous exploration system DCARE that can collaboratively explore complex environment with LiDAR. On the single-robot layer, we develop a frontier-based exploration strategy with deciding exploration goal based on information gain, then a probabilistic-based controller is utilized to navigate the robot. On the multi-robot layer, robots share and incrementally merge perceived map and states, thus robots cooperate based on the combined information. We have conducted experiment in a maze with random pillars and walls, the proposed method finishes the exploration in 383<tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$s$</tex> with 95% spatial coverage rate, achieves 72% improvement in exploration efficiency.