Deploying While Exploring: A Greedy-based Communication Beacons Deployment in Multi-Vehicle Exploration

In multi-vehicle collaborative exploration of unknown environments, it is still a great challenge to maintain the communication between multiple vehicles. In this paper, we present a greedy-based communication beacon deployment method to address this challenge. The proposed method involves each vehicle performing LiDAR-inertial odometry, hierarchical grid-based exploration, and greedy-based beacon deployment. Each time a vehicle reaching the communication boundary, beacon candidate positions are selected. A candidate location that can cover the most uncommunicated area is selected as beacon placement points. Through simulation experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated, showing that it can dynamically deploy beacons to maintain communication within the explored area while minimizing the number of beacons used.