A Comprehensive Cooperative Exploration Framework for Ground and Air Vehicles in Unknown Environments

This paper represents the development of a comprehensive cooperative exploration frame work in which each individual vehicle has the ability to explore an unknown environment by itself and also by cooperative behaviour in a team of several vehicles that consist of ground and air vehicles. Our approach to exploration strategy focuses on solving optimal assignment problem amongst the team by using linear integer programming technique in order to maximize the team’s benefit and minimize the time for exploration. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed framework for multi-vehicle exploration in unknown environments.